THE DRY DOWN GIFT GUIDE 2019

Hello Dry Downers,

Happy holidays! We apologize for the lateness of our gift guide this year — we’ve been traveling and spread hither and yon this season — but to be honest, all the good perfume sales start right after Christmas, so if you are browsing this guide for yourself, you can take some of your leftover cheer and spend it on a little pick-me-up for the new year :) This is pegged to the holidays, but really, perfume is a good gift in any season. We hope this is helpful as you navigate this — often joyful, often fraught — time of year. And if you find yourself feeling lonesome or frustrated or out of sorts this week, perhaps you can spritz yourself with a scent that reminds you that this too shall pass, and a new year is coming, with new possibilities. As always, we are grateful for your readership this year and wish the very best to you and yours.

PS — we will be sending out a note next week to members with an update about the Dry Down’s future in 2020 (and some answers for subscribers who have reached out to us with questions). Look out for it!

Happy Holidays, R + H

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I’ve written before, recently, about Jazmin Sarai’s wonderful line of music-inspired scents, but the discovery set, which comes in a cassette-tape case, is called “The Mixtape Sample Set,” and costs a reasonable $45, is such a truly perfect gift that I couldn’t not start with it. I like every single fragrance in here, although some more than others, and you’ll have your own favorites (this is one of those gift recommendations where you should definitely also buy yourself one), but the one I’m particularly in love with is Neon Graffiti, a green that is at once fresh and luscious, supported by the clean-kitchen comforts of cardamom and mint, with a sexy wink of jasmine whispering around its edges. It’s a green like a gorgeous, overgrown community garden sprouting unexpected out of a grey city block, and it smells like the easy comforts of long friendship and friendly love, like the person who’s known you since you were someone else and still loved you the whole time anyway. You could give this to everyone on your list, really, but give it to the friend who you partied with when you were younger and with whom you now make too many jokes about how old and boring you are getting, because what you really mean is how much you love it, and how proud you are of each other. Give this to the friend who knows where the bodies are buried; if you are old enough to have ever made a mixtape, give this to the person you’ve known since mixtapes were still a thing.  - HF

First of all, I realize I am cheating here because candles are not perfumes. I mean, you could technically melt down your favorite candle and smear it all over your pulse points as if your body is a silken Victorian envelope requiring a wax seal but this is a) greasy and sticky and stain-prone and b) more or less a sign that you have fully lost your mind. But in terms of gifting, candles can be the ideal delivery system for fine fragrance. For one thing, so many of them have gotten out of control expensive, to the point where they are luxury objects that no one can really afford to buy on a Tuesday. So there’s a certain novelty to giving someone a fancy candle -- a shared joke, a wink that says “you are literally going to burn this money I spent into thin air” -- and a certain fanfare to it. It’s impractical and dumb and indulgent, but then what holiday gifts are not? Give someone something they truly need? Bah humbug, save that for their birthday. Holiday gifts are about desire, about gilding, about the tinsel that looks so beautiful that you want to lick it before you realize it is going to make vacuuming a total nightmare for months. You should have a hangover from the holidays, even if you don’t drink -- in that you feel a perpetual “ugh, what did I do?” mixture of regret and shame about your revels and the gifts you reveled in. A candle that costs $250 SHOULD make you feel nauseous and dehydrated! But the deed is done, and now someone you love can make their entire home smell like a dream, and for a moment they can engage in active forgetting -- of the cost, of the excess. So give your loved ones the gift of oblivion, I guess? In any case, Cire Trudon candles are the actual best (how I wish they were not given the $$$) and the one everyone loves is Abd El Kaber, which smells like really dank mint tea and maybe a hit of weed and a touch of berries that is tart and ripe and tickles the nostrils. It’s $105 and gold embossed and someone will love you for it. Other zesty options: DS & Durga’s Portable Fireplace, Mad Et Len’s Darkwood, Sisley Paris’ Rose candle (which is divine, and which I would actually smear on my body). -RS

Every year I recommend that you give your mom perfume, and frankly my own mom is getting sick of receiving perfume gifts, but I still think you should get your mom perfume. Not everyone has a mom, of course, and even fewer people have a close enough relationship with their mom to exchange gifts, or have a mom to whom they could give perfume. Hi Wildflower’s Mala, a swooningly dark-red incense rose fragrance, with a carnation-heavy opening that smells, to me, as the best carnation scents often do, like very righteous anger, and with a dank body-heavy romance of sandalwood and saffron at the base, is also not the sort of thing people usually recommend other people buy for their moms. But this smells like a bold move and a head held high, and I think you should give it to whomever in your life has had a hand in making you who you are, the person who sheltered you, and the person who taught you tough-love lessons about boundaries and about saying no. Maybe that’s your mom, or maybe it isn’t. I think you should give this to a person you admire and who seems just a little larger than life to you, someone who has perhaps at some point offered you permission to be the same way. - HF

There is a certain kind of person who comes into your life like a breeze from an open window; a bracing surprise, but not an unwelcome one. These people are palate cleansers, emotional granita. They blow in, all salt spray and fresh perspective, and help to clear the cobwebs out of the corners of your mind. You cannot conjure these people, or even seek them out; they tend to be stumbled upon, like cracks on the sidewalk. Some years, just as I have been settling into a low-humming rut, I have been fortunate to meet a person who throws everything into contrast, like one of those blacklights that renders every motel duvet unspeakable. This happened to me this year -- I met a 95-year old woman who more or less convinced me that everything I was doing was wrong; not by suggestion, but by example. She takes such care of herself and those around her, and beyond that, she lives really hard; she goes out to the theater, she takes long constitutionals, she shows up for her people. She’s pushing 100 and doing more in a week than I was doing in a month, which made me take stock of a) how much of my life I am wasting online b) how much of my life I am wasting not doing what I really care about and c) how much of my life I am wasting worrying so much about what people think that I forget to actually show people how much they matter to me. In any case, Atelier des Ors’ new scent Pomelo Riviera is a gust of fresh air: maldon salt, orange flower, an almost ripe banana-like jasmine hit, and a tart squeeze of grapefruit across the top that makes the whole thing smell like drinking a paloma on a veranda somewhere. Give this to someone who has helped you clear the decks. - RS

I mean there is absolutely no one on your holiday gift list to whom you should give Pierre Guillaume’s Cuir Venenum. A perfume built to smell like leather against sweaty skin, it is a truly indecent blend of leather and honey and musk and orange blossom and cedar that smells like someone you only met for a few hours but whom you thought about for far too long afterwards. It smells like the shallow-breathing terror of being in a small elevator with a very attractive stranger and it smells not the way a dance party ever actually feels but the way you imagined it would before you had ever actually gone to a dance party, and it smells like photos of Grace Jones in the 1970s. Don’t buy it for anyone, or buy it for yourself, or buy it for that friend who says they don’t like perfume because they hate everything that smells like flowers and grandmas (their grandma is far more likely to have actually gone to the party that smelled like this perfume than they are, but don’t tell them that). - HF

We are coming to the end of a long decade, and pretty much everyone I know feels more exhausted by the years behind us than thrilled about the years to come. But I also know this is not a permanent state -- the calendar will flip, and we will bolster ourselves, and we will make resolutions, and we will jut out our chins and start again. If I have any predictions to make about the 2020s, it’s that they won’t be roaring, but they also won’t be a period of total austerity. As the world heats up and the news gets more topsy-turvy, I have a feeling that glamour is going to be its own precious resource, something less dictated and broadcast by the few and instead cultivated and redefined by the many as a way to get through the days. It’s hard to say how this will translate into perfume -- the most esoteric of luxury goods, the most ephemeral -- but I think it will be less about waste and excess and more about experimentation and, as the Tilda Swinton once wrote of her favorite type of art, it will have “the whiff of the school play.” This is all to say that perhaps going into 2020 you want to get more into samplers rather than big bottles you must lug around. You can really play with them, and you can use them up to the last drop, and then recycle their little vials. My favorite sample sets at the moment: Nicolai, Hi Wildflower, Neela Vermiere, Frederic Malle, Floraiku, Heretic. Give this to someone who reminds you to dance. - RS

Gifts by way of apology are likely a bad idea, or at least gifts are a bad idea if they are offered in place of an apology. It has been a hard year, and perhaps a hard decade, for all of us, which means we are all likely to have some apologies we owe, and some amends we need to make. There are likely people with whom we wish we had been gentler, and to whom we long to extend greater kindness. Heeley’s Sel Marin smells like the ocean, and the relief at what the ocean washes away. It smells like the baptismal, redemptive promises of water, the idea of clean records and fresh starts. It smells like the gentle exhaustion at the end of a long day at the beach, a solitary, northern beach on a lightly chilly day, or a beach in LA on the coldest day Southern California offers in December. It smells like speaking softly, and being patient, listening without thinking of what to say next. It smells like amends, and like forgiveness. Give this to someone whom you feel is owed greater softness, whether by you or by the world.  - HF

Sometimes we overthink it. Sometimes perfume just has to be beautiful. Sometimes it just needs to be a bottle of gorgeous syrup that changes the vibrations and posture of the wearer; that makes them walk a little faster and feel a little more confident making quotidian decisions throughout the day. Perfume as a gift -- to others or to yourself -- is, at heart, a shorthand for giving away (or drawing close) sumptuousness and loveliness. It says: please, wrap yourself in an invisible idea about deserving the exquisite. So, if you know someone, or feel that you are someone, lacking the exquisite this year, I recommend the new Dusita Spendiris. It is a pale purple juice, the color of violet pastilles. It is, according to the perfumer, an attempt to isolate the crumbly and delicate fragrance of an iris bulb in bloom. But as an iris soliflore would be as faint as a whisper, the flower comes encased in a full butter crust: orris, carrot seed, jasmin sambac, gooey vanilla pods. This is a dramatic and walloping perfume. Give it to someone who needs to be buttressed by possibilities. - RS