The Nice List: A Free(ish) Seasons x Caudalie Diffuser

In its signature Caudalie Bordeaux shade, this Seasons x Caudalie diffuser is a beautiful addition to any table.

Looking like a ceramic vase or art objet, the Seasons x Caudalie diffuser may be the best Gift With Purchase ever.

If it’s getting a little too fireplace candle-scented in your home, this diffuser, that you load up with the stress-busting scent of Caudalie Beauty Elixir, is what you need to see you through the coming dark winter months.

Caudalie have partnered with Seasons to create this striking diffuser in the signature Caudalie Bordeaux shade to gently and continuously scent your air with Beauty Elixir’s famous “garden’s worth of rose, orange blossom, rosemary and aromatic myrrh” like a magical, unseen house fairy. And because you charge the unit with a USB cable, there’s no ugly power cord attaching it to a wall.

As a free gift with purchase in stores at Sephora through Caudalie, it requires a minimum spend of $300, which I know sounds steep, but a Seasons diffuser retails for around $180 Canadian on its own. So buy everyone on your list a Caudalie gift set (not even joking) and finish off your holiday gift buying in one fell swoop.

It’s just so beautiful. So many diffusers are pretty enough (I’m lying. I loathe most of them) but their ‘spa vibe’ only looks right on a shelf in your yoga room or in the bathroom.) But Seasons x Caudalie is chic and looks at home on a stack of books or on the coffee table. It really ties the room together. (100 points if you know where that quote comes from.)

Here are some favourite Caudalie gift sets from Sephora to reach that $300 mark:

The Vinotherapist Body Moisturizing Duo in just the prettiest pale purple hatbox contains Caudalie’s newest Vinotherapist Hand and Nail cream and a giant jar of their new, heavenly smelling, quick absorbing, vegan Replenishing Body Butter, $95. Sephora.com

The Caudalie Vinoperfect Dark Spot Brightening Solution Set, $95, Sephora.com, contains brand stars like the Brightening Glycolic Essence (a staple no matter what other brands you use) and the very effective yet quite gentle Brightening Moisturizer.

This is a great deal: a bottle of Beauty Elixir to spray in the air, on yourself and to use in the diffuser, along with a pore-clearing Vinergetic C+ Instant Detox mask, $25, Sephora.com. It’s your serene Saturday movie night, sorted.

(Semi-related aside: I am particularly fond of the tableau in the photo at the top of this story, because that is Craig’s winning entry to the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. mic drop.)

Summer Whites

Axel Vervoordt’s home in Venice.

If this was your Venetian palazzo, you’d probably have assistants to help you open up for the summer and flip the closets from cold to warm weather clothing. And they would definitely have laundered all those slipcovers.

Early June is when I, on a much smaller scale, ease myself and my home into summer, swapping out everything black or grey for a more seasonally appropriate white. Here is an admittedly incomplete list of some things you can get in anticipation of the season.

Left unbuttoned as a beach coverup to throw over a bathing suit or dressed up with proper jewelry or worn casually with slides and a raffia clutch (I could go on and on), this white linen summer dress, COS.com, $150 CAN is a summer staple. And it has pockets!

Put away your heavy cotton towels and switch to lightweight linen waffle towels from Flax Home for summer. In bright white in sizes from hand- to enormous bath sheet ($38-$88) they brighten a bathroom and are much more practical than cotton. Linen is highly absorbent and dries quickly so even when it’s humid and the air is heavy, you never have to suffer the olfactory assault of damp, moldy-smelling towels (the smell of freshman dorm rooms.)

I have succumbed to the ugly shoe trend because these Oofos OOAHH slides, $74, oofos.ca, are just so comfortable (at least three of my girlfriends have this model.) They provide the arch support busted feet need and are pleasingly squishy and shock-absorbing when your foot hits the pavement. Important note: it’s critical when wearing a biomorphically blobby-looking shoe to have an immaculate pedicure. No exceptions. Ergo, this beautiful Essie colour for summery toes (below.)

Essie’s new Boatloads of Love nail polish, $11.99, Shoppers Drug Mart, is an opaque soft white with the faintest blue shimmer and just enough creamy pink that you don’t look like you painted your nails with Liquid Paper™ (There’s an ancient schoolroom reference.) It’s crisp, chic, very summery and very wearable.

Look at your bathroom with a dispassionate eye and you’ll see that in addition to replacing towels, it’s also time to clear out all the nearly-empty shampoo bottles littering the shower. Replace them with an eco-friendly, refillable, recycled-aluminum bottle of Kérastase Nutritive from their new Kérastase refillable line. (Of course I chose the white one, but Nutritive for ‘sensitized’ damaged hair is perfect for summer.) The initial purchase of a bottle with a 500 ml pouch of shampoo (twice the amount of product in a regular 250 ml. bottle) is $80, kerastase.ca and salons, and each subsequent 500 ml refill is $72.

It’s a happy day for anyone wanting a more elegant olfactory experience when cleaning the house as Diptyque has entered the home care space with their new La Droguerie line of eco-friendly household care products. There’s dish soap, leather and wood lotion, multi-surface cleaner and these white porcelain medallions ($61 CAN, Holt Renfrew) impregnated with cedar oil to hang in the closet or slide into a drawer to protect your woollens from being munched by evil moths over the summer.

The Best Candle You Can't Buy

This half-empty glass jar is all that’s left of my Annick Goutal Le Sac de ma Mère, the first and most imitated of all makeup-and-perfume-inspired candles. 

It was created by Annick Goutal’s daughter Camille as a sense memory of her late mother’s leather Hermès Kelly bag and its cigarette, face powder and lipstick contents after her far too early death at age 53. It predated Astier de Villatte’s Rue St. Honoré (commingled women’s fragrances in a Paris dress shop) Ladurée’s Rice Powder (rose and violet face powder), Byredo’s Loose Lips (lipstick) and Diptyque’s 2016 limited edition rose, violet and leather Rosa Viola, also inspired by a mother’s purse (and also needing a reissue.)

They’re all good, but Le Sac de Ma Mère is the queen: powdery violet, a rose ‘lipstick accord’ and oakmoss, tied together with a singular leather note. (I should go to Hermès and start huffing the bags to see if it’s a true ‘Kelly’ scent. That would get me banned pretty quickly I should think.) Le Sac de Ma Mère is complex, it’s fantastic, and it’s no longer for sale because it’s been bloody discontinued.

Korean cosmetics behemoth Amorepacific bought the brand in 2011.  Goutal was best known for Eau d’Hadrien, a citrus and cypress aromatic cologne that’s been shorthand for in-the-know Parisian chic since its debut in 1981, but the brand was moribund and its packaging dated (gilt bows on ribbed Victorian cologne bottles, endearingly fusty, striped candle jars.)

It relaunched in 2018 as Goutal Paris with a snappy new font, the candles in faceted sleek glass vessels, all good, all fine, but they didn’t bring back Le Sac De Ma Mère which defies understanding.

Bad things can happen when brands get sold and favourites are discontinued, erasing the brand DNA that made the company desirable in the first place.  

I don’t light my Sac de Ma Mère anymore, it’s way too precious. But it’s held its scent beautifully, so I put in my bureau, to perfume my scarves (which is a very mom thing to do, I think.)