to Baby Grace by Philosophy. It’s a floral milky sweet powder scent, clean and
simplistic, with an impression of watercolor and flannel. The bottle is spare
and opaque, and the alcohol-free formula means the fragrance is kinder to skin,
although the trade-off is that it fades more
quickly.
My next purchase – triggered by
making it to my 2nd trimester without much bloodiness – was Calypso St. Barth’s
Vanille. This is a floral vanilla, sweet but not overpoweringly so, and it has a
certain mild fruitiness about it. The vanilla is neither smoky nor complex, it
leans more towards sugary candy vanilla. It is certainly a departure from the
creamy rich vanillas I favor – L’Occitane’s interpretation being one of them –
but a welcome one.
What is really making
me happy nowadays isn’t in a bottle, however. It’s a vanilla-neroli-fruit scent
carried in a cocoa butter base, in a bar meant to moisturize one’s hands. It’s
Lush’s aptly-named “The Soft Touch” body butter, and I have become seriously
habituated to it. It helps that it’s mostly cocoa butter, which means I can use
it to help keep stretch marks at bay. But the scent is so relaxing, and so
wonderful, that I don’t mind if it does diddly-squat.