Forever Summer: Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse Neroli

Ignore all the online sweater and boot propaganda. There are roughly four weeks of summer left, so let’s extend the happy, bare skin feeling because soon enough the central air will get switched on and we’re all going to shrivel up like raisins.

The original Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse.

The original Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse was already the star of every single French Pharmacy haul video or story for its lightweight, non-greasy ‘dry oil’ feeling, its warm skin scent and magical ability to smooth frizzy hair and instantly make skin look supple. It epitomizes my belief that beauty-wise, French women have it better than we do. And now Nuxe has launched Huile Prodigieuse Néroli, ($53, Shoppers Drug Mart) a certified organic version scented with neroli oil, from the blossom of the bitter orange tree. Heady but with enough green citrus sharpness to keep it fresh, neroli is the smell of French summer.

Scent aside, Huile Prodigieuse is a skincare workhorse with antioxidant- and anti-inflammatory rich sesame seed oil to help repair skin and give hair strength and shine and plum seed oil, with fatty acids for dry skin and hair — critical as the weather turns to s(&^! and the air loses moisture.

Use it to gleam up your shoulders, shins and forearms, rub it into your cuticles (don’t forget your toes have cuticles too) and run some through your hair to smooth frizz or coax out some waves. Then head out into the world, smelling heavenly and glowing greaselessly.

‘Greaselessly.’ Not a beauty word. Oh well. Still accurate.

Black and Tan

What happens when you wear black all year and then summer comes along? I don’t want to be the town goth, a look better left to emo teens.

The answer is to just (duh) keep wearing black but lighten up the fabric. A breezy, black linen dress is summery when paired with a natural leather cross-body bag that will only get better the more beaten up it gets. And go hard with the self-tanner to get your limbs to the tawny state of the model in the photo above. (But please get that tan through self tanner, not, you know, the actual sun.)

Upper left: top to bottom: Tan Luxe The Butter ($50, Sephora) is a twofer that moisturizes dry skin to the point of gleaming while also building natural-looking colour. Pale is beautiful but sue me - a faux tan looks good.

Summer Fridays Shade Drops, SPF 30, $47 CAN, Sephora.com, is a light mineral sunscreen lotion with a faint tint that blends in easily into all skin tones without leaving any whiteish cast at all. It’s quite amazing. And because it’s a mineral screen that doesn’t require absorption time to offer optimal protection, you can apply it and head right out the door.

The Victoria Diva hat, $68.83, from Australian brand Wallaroo (trust the Australians when it comes to sun protection) is a crushable wonder that holds its shape (so good for packing) while its weave will leave your head cool but your face still protected from UV rays.

The tortoise frame with green lens Classic RayBan Wayfarers, $207, Sunglass Hut, adds dimension to an all-black outfit. And compared to the ever-spirallaing price of designer shades ($500 for sunglasses? Really?) they are a bargain by comparison.

Tom Cruise, three years before Top Gun sealed his status as eternal movie god.

Apropos RayBan Wayfarers (well, the black ones,) can you believe that Risky Business turns forty next year?

Vachetta natural leather starts out pale pink and warms into a caramel when exposed to the sun and just looks better with age. This Leather bag $135 CAN, from Etsy, can be worn cross-body or just as a shoulder bag and is roomy without being overly large.

The black leather Carrick slide from Banana Republic, $109.97, is sleek and low profile with only a twisted leather upper for ornamentation.

This crisp A classic, ‘close but not to close’ to the body dress in black linen looks polished for city wear floaty (yes, you can have both!) number from Max Mara Leisure, is on sale at SSense.com for $123. Go get it.

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.

Late Summer Refresh

Romy Schneider in fashion’s favourite film, La Piscine

I am stuffing my fingers in my ears to avoid hearing anyone say “August is the Sunday of summer.” There is officially one month of summer left and I plan to enjoy it. You will find me outdoors with friends and (hopefully) with a glass of iced rosé* in my hand. In the spirit of glamorous lounging, here are some late summer pick-me-ups to keep you as looking as cool as Romy Schneider in 1969’s La Piscine.

Products clockwise from upper right: Valmont Palazzo Nobile Fizzy Mint eau de toilette, $240, Holt Renfrew, with notes of crushed mint, lemon verbena and bergamot is like running through the coolest and fanciest sprinkler on a hot day.

Set off tan skin with OPI’s From Dusk til Dune ($10.95, Trade Secrets) a pale, creamy almost-pink polish shot through with glinting blue micro-glitter that cleverly bounces light to mask surface irregularities on your nails.

For an elevated beach read, Ashley Mears’ Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit ($40, Indigo books) is a sharp-eyed but nuanced insider’s tour through the ‘models and bottles’ world of fancy nightclubs, ‘enterprising’ party promoters and beautiful women used as props to lure rich men.

Guerlain Terracotta bronzing powder, $66, Shoppers Drug Mart, now boasts 96% naturally-derived ingredients with a wide shade range in a fine powder formulation that melts into skin for a believable tan.

Summer Friday’s Lip Butter Balm in new Vanilla Beige $29, Sephora) subtly tints lips for a tawny effect to set off darker skin or amplify a tan.

Resuscitate sun and chlorine-dried hair with Klorane’s Nourishing & Repairing Mask with Cupuaçu butter ($14.99, Well.ca) Leave it on for minutes or overnight as a rinse-off mask or warm a bit in your hands and rake through your damp hair as a leave-in conditioner.

* An iced rosé is known as a ‘piscine’ (swimming pool) in France.

Coveting: A Men’s Blue Shirt

A couple of weeks ago, I became obsessed with the idea of wearing an over-sized, pale blue, men’s linen shirt as a cover-up at the beach. But by then, it was already mid-July and they were sold out everywhere. So I began searching online resale.

Doppelgänger shirt’s Poshmark listing

Clothing resale is growing rapidly online, given the surfeit of unsold garments created by the relentless churn of fast fashion. With 70 pounds of clothing per person going to landfill each year, it is definitely time to start mining that mountain of misfit clothes.

Instead of searching on a designer site like theRealReal, I tried the more populist Poshmark, and quickly found two men’s shirts: a very pale number for $25 from Doppelgänger (an Italian chain that I’d never heard of) and a never-worn one from Uniqlo still bearing its in-store fold marks and a size L sticker, for only $15.

Unlike flipping through the racks at Value Village, Poshmark wares come pre-sorted so there’s no real life digging, followed by that “eureka” moment when you spot a treasure amidst the dross. But finding the exact thing I wanted was still pretty satisfying. And there is quite a bit of summer left to wear my “new” blue shirts to the beach.