Echt Kölnisch Wasser 4711 1792 Eau de Cologne

Lotti and Irmi. Sisters. They grew up in Silesia. Lotti became a seamstress and a milliner. Irmi took over her parents' flower stall at the market.

After months of trekking, and they and the horses were simply too exhausted to move on, they were assigned a room with a war widow in a small northern German town. Welcome, they were not there.

That changed only after Lotti began to sew clothes from old uniforms, sheets and blankets. So slowly she made a name for herself in the place with that. Especially since she also took on any kind of alterations. It wasn't long before Irmi had traded an old sewing machine for Lotti on the black market. She had given her earrings for it.

In general, the sisters could not have been more different.

Lotti was always elegantly dressed. Costume, preferably in a shade of yellow, matching hat, gloves. Even in the summer. Irmi loved her old trousers and the washed-out green yoke she had worn in the beginning when working in the fields, which she had taken on with a farmer. One graceful and small, the other tall and stout.

Only two things, they both had in common. Their almost water-blue eyes and a fondness for 4711.

After Lotti opened a small tailor shop and also started making hats again, the two of them moved into a tiny cottage.

The smell when you entered, I'll never forget it. Everywhere in the small rooms were small bowls, in which small cotton balls lay. These were regularly soaked with the cologne.

This tangy fresh, a very little bit bitter note of orange and lemon, this fine herbaceous spice, the slight hint of lavender, embraced a summer as winter.
And they always smelled of it, too. Lotti always put a few spritzes on her handkerchief and then dabbed her forehead and neck. Irmi was less complicated. She would take the bottle and put a few drops on her décolleté. And if then only a soft reverberation on the skin lay, was immediately nachgelegt.

When I visited them as a child, my chocolate mouth was wiped with it, if I had an abrasion it was used to clean the wound and I think they also used it as a mouthwash additive. In any case, a good shot of it was always put in the little bowl of ironing water.

That was a long time ago, but when I smell the scent today, refreshing myself with it in the summer, it's an incredibly nice feeling. And then there are somewhere also Lotti and Irmi.