Ô de Lancôme Lancôme 1969 Eau de Toilette

It happened recently while I was tidying up. Once a year, let's say, I organize my books. I dust them off. I see if maybe I should part with a few of them. I almost never do that, though. On the upper shelves, which require a ladder, are books that I have almost forgotten about, under - sometimes - twelve months of dust. (I am a good and decisive thrower and sorter, but not when it comes to books: the respect for the written word - as silly as it may sometimes be - runs deep in me.) And then - quite suddenly - I had it in my hands for the first time in at least twenty years: Enchanted April, written by Elizabeth von Arnim almost a hundred years ago. I then sat on the edge of the sofa with the dusty book and read its nearly three hundred pages in one go.

Enchanted April is what one would commonly call a 'women's book.' So what? Von Arnim tells the story of four very different ladies - Englishwomen like her, too happy to call themselves unhappy, but too unhappy to be happy - who together rent a wonderful villa on the Italian coast for a month - that very April. And how each of them comes a little closer to happiness in her own way. Von Arnim revels in light and colors, tells of sunshine, flowers, scents - in a language that is light-footed and airy, but never simple-minded or banal. And when I finished reading the nearly three hundred pages - partly leaning on the sofa's edge, eventually sitting, while the already sorted empty bottles stared accusingly at me from the hallway - the villa by the sea and its little happiness felt very close.

The same lightness and airiness, the same faded charm and the same fragrant colors, the same slightly old-fashioned but loving and careful language - and sunshine, flowers, scents, told lightly but never trivially - I find in Ô de Lancôme. Ô comes from a time when it was common to clearly categorize a perfume as a women's or men's scent - by today's standards, its classification as a women's fragrance seems almost anachronistic - being a delicate hesperidic chypre. It is nostalgic and a bit old-fashioned - yet youthful and eternally young. With an almost watery herbaceousness - dry, but not bitter, serious, but not solemn - it reminds me of those four very different people whose souls unexpectedly regain wings in the Ligurian spring sun. A lot of kindness and longing - and joy in the little happiness.

Conclusion: Moments like my leisurely afternoon with 'Enchanted April' have a calm, unexpected, and sudden beauty. And Ô de Lancôme has that too. For women. Men. People.