Joya, the New York-based purveyor of artisanal candles and home fragrance, has just announced a collaboration with London-based luxury accessories designer Oliver Ruuger. The result is a limited edition candle called “In Girum,” encased in engraved leather. A limited edition print of the artwork is also available.

From Joya:

“The engraved leather case is produced from British saddle hide with artwork burned deep into the thick leather. The encased candle is poured at the Joya Studio using soy, vegetable oil, beeswax, fragrance and cotton wick. Its distinctive scent, which combines powerful characters of woodsmoke, fire and cade, is carried by deep, naturally-coloured resinous wax.

The subject of the artwork is formed around an ancient Latin palindrome and offers an answer to the riddle: ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni.’ Translation: ‘We go into the circle at night and are consumed by fire.’”

I’ve never come across that palindrome before, and I love it. The candle costs $450, so I won’t be acquiring one. But I’m still drawn to it, like a moth to flame, and I thought my fellow art/fragrance-lovers might want to know about it too.

Images: via Joya press release.

This morning, my friend C. and I were enjoying brunch together and were looking through the Sunday Times as we ate. This advertisement for Dior made us both laugh.

It’s titled “Secret Garden 2: Versailles,” and apparently there’s some online video that we can watch to learn more. I haven’t done that yet. I’m more interested in the ad’s visual source, which has nothing to do with Versailles at all.

The Dior ad is a contemporary re-staging of Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863, minus most of its original shock value. When first exhibited, Manet’s painting was considered scandalous for its deliberate lack of finish, its flattened perspective, and its subject matter—contemporary Parisians, rather than gods and goddesses, sprawled in such a casual (and co-ed!) manner at their picnic. The original viewers were just as affronted by the naked woman’s direct stare as they were by her naked body.

You can read more about Le déjeuner sur l’herbe on Wikipedia or the Musée d’Orsay website.

Dior isn’t being particularly innovative here; Manet’s proto-Impressionist masterwork has been parodied and reinterpreted more times than anyone can count.

Here’s one of my favorite homages: the cover for the EP album “The Last of the Mohicans” from the British New Wave band Bow Bow Bow, released in 1982.

Dior’s new ad hasn’t raised my interest in owning anything from the brand, but it does make me wonder how many potential customers will catch its art-historical reference.

My latest post on Now Smell This is a review of the fragrances Geisha Blanche and Geisha Blue from Aroma M. You can read it here.

I took this picture through a bus window on a rainy day, so it’s not especially sharp. But this graffiti made me smile, and I wanted to capture it and share it.

My husband and I share many interests. Two exceptions: a passion for beauty products (mine) and a lifelong devotion to comic books (his). But when he came across this particular Captain America comic book a few days ago, he knew that it would interest me, so he passed it along.

Captain America: Transformation & Triumph is a collaboration between Marvel Comics and skincare retailer Kiehl’s, and it’s been distributed in The Wall Street Journal in major American cities as a promotional gimmick to attract male shoppers (see the AdAge store here). (Comics + WSJ = lots of men, apparently. Well, let’s just go with it.)

The story here is short but fun. It opens in 1943, with Steve Rogers (in his pre-superhero life) browsing in Kiehl’s before he reports for wartime service. He’s assisted by Irving Morse, Kiehl’s owner at the time.

We return to the Kiehl’s flagship store, still located at the corner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, in the present day. “Doc” Morse has passed on, but Steve Rogers, now Captain America, has returned to investigate the imminent theft of some top-secret chemicals stored in the Kiehl’s basement.

Of course there’s a fight scene, complete with sound-effect bubbles, between Captain American and the mercenary thief Cobra. Shelves of “Healthy Skin Essentials” are visible in the background, and Cobra tries to beat his adversary with a vintage motorcycle displayed in the store (a true-to-life detail).

I asked my husband whether this comic would make him more likely to pop into Kiehl’s to purchase any of the products advertised at the back of the magazine. “I could safely say no,” he replied. He reminded me that Disney now owns Marvel, so that “there will be no end of [Marvel] prostituting themselves.” He’s very serious about his comics.

As for me? I only use a few Kiehl’s products, and many of my favorites have been discontinued since L’Oreal took over the brand in 2000, but I didn’t mind this bit of cross-marketing. However, since I’m not a man, and certainly not a high-earning businessman, I’m not the target audience.

If you have a strong opinion about this promotion, feel free to share!

I recently wrote about my new-found liking for Aesop’s skincare, particularly its Fabulous Face Oil. One of the many nice things about Aesop is the company’s sample policy: I’ve received several thoughtfully recommended samples of other products every time I’ve made a purchase. I’ve recently been trying out Aesop’s Purifying Facial Cream Cleanser, and once again, I’m impressed.

Purifying Facial Cream Cleanser is a gentle but effective non-foaming cleanser. I’ve been using it in the morning on days when I need a little something more than my usual rosewater spritzing. I work a small amount into my skin, let it sit for about fifteen seconds, and rinse it away thoroughly. My face ends up feeling clean and soft but not at all stripped or tight.

This product contains a few beneficial botanicals that make it lightly astringent (lavender and rosemary oils) and soothing (rosehip oil and chamomile) at the same time. Another key deep-cleansing ingredient is kaolin clay. The cream has an herbal scent from the lavender and rosemary. And, one more selling point for me, it’s packaged in a handy flip-top tube.

I don’t think this cleanser would remove makeup (especially foundation) very well on its own, and it might not be powerful enough for an oily complexion, but for morning use on my dehydrated combination skin, it’s just right.

As with many Aesop products, Purifying Facial Cream Cleanser isn’t cheap ($39 for 3.4 oz.), but it’s not as ridiculously marked-up as many other natural skincare lines, and it works so well and requires so little product per usage that I’m not too annoyed by the price. I’m considering buying a full-sized tube for the summer.

Product source: I received free sample packets at an Aesop boutique.

Images: via the Aesop website.

I’m thinking of adding yet another category to my posts here on Tinsel Creation: short meditations on movie scenes that include perfume or other beauty products as tokens of self-invention, entry points to fantasy, or clues to characters’ personalities. I’m not a film critic (unlike my friend The Self-Styled Siren, whose blog you really should read), and I won’t be commenting smartly on design the way my buddy Karen of Small Earth Vintage does on her blog (see her recent post on Moonrise Kingdom here!). Instead, I’ll be obsessing, in my usual way, about the bigger importance of little things like lipstick and scent bottles.

Image: Laurey (Shirley Jones) smelling “Elixir of Egypt” in Oklahoma! (1955).

It’s my totally unscientific opinion that women are now buying nail polishes they way they used to buy lipsticks: as affordable luxuries, easy ways to follow a trend, and little pick-me-ups for days that didn’t go quite right. I probably own a few more than I really need to own, but my collection is still much smaller than you might guess. In fact, I’d be able to pare it down to five, if I really tried.

Essie A Room with a View: Everyone needs to own a pale, ladylike pink shade, right?—and Essie makes the best ones. Mademoiselle and Ballet Slippers always seem to top the “readers’ choice” polls in magazines, but this is my favorite. It has a soft shimmer that keeps it from looking chalky.

OPI Light My Sapphire: Remember the 90s, when dark, vampy nail polishes were still new to the mainstream? Now they’re almost classics. I still love this shade, which doesn’t photograph well at all: it’s a deep blue-black, like India ink, with very subtle dark-gray shimmer.

Sally Hansen Commander in Chic: The more recent taste for taupe/greige/putty/mushroom polishes brought us a range of new neutrals. I always get compliments on this sophisticated drugstore shade. It has a tiny hint of lilac that keeps it from looking dull against my pale skin.

Lancôme Rose Plumeti: Sometimes you just want a pretty, traditionally feminine manicure. This is a cool, medium rosy-pink with a delicate shimmery-creme finish. It’s more of a splurge, but it has excellent endurance on busy hands.

OPI Give Me the Moon: I’ve already written about this shade (see this post), but I’ll repeat myself: Give Me the Moon is the ideal iridescent lavender-gray shade that I’d been trying to find for a long time. It’s probably the most “me” nail polish that I own.

Do you have any essential nail polishes that you’d like to recommend? Feel free to comment!

On Friday afternoon I made a visit to Bite Beauty’s pop-up “Lip Lab” boutique in SoHo. I’ve always been curious about Bite’s lip color line (food-grade ingredients! shades named after different wine varietals!), but I usually find the atmosphere in Sephora too chaotic for any sustained browsing. The Bite pop-up seemed like a perfect opportunity to learn more about the brand and maybe, just maybe, to purchase a lipstick…

The boutique is located at 174 Prince Street and it will be open all summer; then it will be “re-designed” into a permanent space for the fall. For now, it carries the complete Bite Beauty line and offers a customized lipstick process for anyone who wants to spend a little more time having her obsessively specific lip color wishes granted.

I gravitated towards the colors in the Berry and Pink families: here are swatches of Crème Lipstick in Zin (muted berry), Fig (nude rose), and Vouvray (ballet pink) on my hand. I was most partial towards the Fig, but I was hoping to find something just a touch deeper and cooler, so I decided to opt for the customized color option.

Two sampling stations are available for testing the colors in the regular lipstick and gloss lines or for concocting a customized shade in Luminous Crème lipstick. The pots contain blends of the standard shades, which is an easier (and more reliable) way to combine colors than layering them on the lips.

One of Bite’s makeup artists helped me to try three blends. I really fell for the one above, which is a mix of Shiraz (soft plum) and Rosé (peachy pink). I wouldn’t have selected either shade on its own—the Shiraz was too dark for me and the Rosé was too bright and warm-toned—but together, they were perfect.

The pre-mixed colors are stored in the boutique as truffle-like solids, kept on shelves in a refrigerator-like unit. They really did look good enough to eat.

The makeup artist (whose name I forgot to ask, but she was very kind and professional!) melted a chunk of my chosen blend at the boutique’s “lab” counter. If I had wanted the color slightly lightened or made more sheer, or if I’d even wanted to add a dab of another shade, she would have made those adjustments too.

The custom lipstick can be scented with a choice of four extracts: peppermint, “superfruit” (berry-pomegranate?), cherry, or violet. Guess which I chose? Yes, violet. A prescribed number of drops was added to the now-liquid lipstick base.

Then the liquid was poured into a tightly screwed mold and placed on a high-tech chilling plate for five minutes. You can see the frosty residue gathering on the plate in my (slightly blurry) photo.

After the lipstick blend had hardened at that low temperature, the makeup artist wore a special black glove to open the mold and fit the lipstick “bullet” into its screw-up tube.

The finished Luminous Crème Lipstick was sealed up in a Bite Beauty box and was handed to me with a card recording the lipstick’s color formula and scent, in case I want to have my “recipe” duplicated on future visitl

Here’s the final product, photographed at home. (I love Bite’s minimal, yet tactile, matte-gray packaging.) Its color is a soft, but deep, plummy rose. I have a feeling that I’ll be using this lipstick more than almost any other in my collection.

The Bite Beauty Lip Lab is located at 174 Prince Street in SoHo. For more information, see the Bite Beauty blog.

Images: all photos by Tinsel Creation.

My latest post on Now Smell This is a review of the fragrance Fleur de Louis from niche house Arquiste. You can read it here.