Perfume Diary #8: Miller Harris Wander and La Feuille (HF)

I’m breaking one of our unofficial rules here, and recommending a scent available neither on Luckyscent, nor at Osswald, nor at Twisted Lily. Miller Harris’ perfumes are so far sold only in the UK and Europe (although some are available through Amazon and other websites that ship to the US), which is why I was so unfamiliar with them when I stumbled on their store while a friend and I were making our way through the tourist snarl in the center of London last week. I’d turned onto one of those streets so taken over by expensive, manicured commerce as to give it the remodeled-kitchen feeling of an outdoor mall. Streets like this are aways mildly sinister, just like malls are, but, also like malls, they usually smell great. A concentrated enough collection of high-end commerce gives off its own scent. Malls smell the way they do partly because of the blasts of smell going on all day in their fragrance departments, spread out from the gauntlets of salespeople with spray bottles and scent cards posted at the entrance to the beauty floor like guards of an ancient arena. But it’s more than just that. Malls have a smell because that’s just what malls smell like, and the scent comes from nowhere except from being a mall, and is recognizable as the scent of mall.

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