Dark red lipstick and a pair of diamonds encrusted snakes winding their way up your arm is all you need for New Year’s Eve.
I’m going to make our quiet New Year’s Eve feel like a crowded 1990s party by getting Craig to blow cigarette smoke directly into my hair after I go hard with red lipstick and spray myself with an extravagant evening fragrance. I really miss the perfume-plus-smoke smell of a party and want to feel like I had a wonderful time at an overcrowded fête without actually spending time in an unventilated room with drunken strangers.
But where can I buy just one cigarette? Maybe lighting and then blowing out a stick of Palo Santo to wave around my head would work equally well, because Palo Santo is something I actually have.
And these two newish perfumes epitomize the big party vibe I crave.
Mugler Angel Nova eau de parfum, $115, Shoppers Drug Mart, launched last year when no one was feeling particularly festive, so I am drawing your attention to it now. It doesn’t smell much like the famously vanilla/patchouli/cotton candyish Angel. It’s more of a tipsy, smeared lipstick scent: all waxy rose and woods, patchouli and musk. It smells like being beautifully dressed and somewhat slutty, but slutty somewhere cool, like Venice.
Carolina Herrera Very Good Girl eau de parfum, $130, Shoppers Drug Mart, starts out as a happy, fizzy cocktail with lychee and red currant before deepening into dark rose and resinous vetiver. It’s like a shiv hidden under a poofy crinoline. Or like a sleek-limbed vamp in a black and white Helmut Newton photo (see above).
Burt’s Bees 100% natural Lip Crayon in Napa Vineyard, $9.99, London Drugs, is an under-appreciated gem with clean beauty bona fides at a drugstore price. The colour is a deep rich red, the formula is beautifully moisturizing and the twist up crayon format makes it easy to apply. We need the small joy of buying a glorious product that doesn’t make our wallets shriek. New year, new budgetary restraint, amirite?