Caudalie Fig Body Oil: Practically Perfect in Every Way

Caudalie’s new Smooth & Glow Oil Elixir, (Sephora Canada, $66) is for anyone who spent the summer in the water until their fingers got all pruney and their hair turned to straw. Or it’s for that optimistic soul who stayed too long in the sun, trying to bank enough residual heat to keep them warm throughout the winter. Pity that doesn’t actually work.

But dreading winter aside, this is the oil blend to take your dried-out, late summer skin from faintly reptilian to a hydrated, ‘let’s turn the clock back, shall we?’ dream state. Loaded with antioxidant-rich prickly pear, argan and shea oils, Caudalie Smooth & Glow Elixir also adds softness and shine to crispy, frizzed out hair. All with a wonderful, ‘fig bush after a summer storm’ fragrance. And while the scent is epically figgy, there’s also a faint undercurrent of warm cedar to temper the sweetness. (If you like Diptyque’s Philosykos, Caudalie Smooth & Glow is for you.)

But I’m betting you won’t truly appreciate this oil until you crack open a bottle in deepest darkest November. Then you’ll get a serotonin jolt of happy from the scent and your skin will be very grateful for the much-needed moisture. But why would I even mention November? That seems unnecessarily negative.

Hibernation Nation

On the old Australian tv show, Your Life on the Lawn, decluttering experts would empty the contents of messy houses into the yard, so homeowners could see all their belongings in the bright, unforgiving sunshine.

I could use that assist right now, choosing what deserves to be in my home and what should get chucked and never spoken of again.

It is late November. We are about to be stuck inside with all our stuff for the next four months. Between the weird stasis of early lockdowns and just life in general, things are a bit chaotic over here.

And while I am certainly not the person to offer decluttering advice (I mean, I still want help from an early 2000s tv show) I can recommend these small additions to your home to make things a little bit nicer this winter in your hobbit hole.

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” That’s me, trying to elevate a discussion of toilet plungers with a William Morris quote.

Unless you have a fleet of invisible house fairies who keep the moving parts of your home working without your knowledge (the dream), you need a plunger within reach. This Libman premium plunger and caddy, $16.99, Canadian Tire, stays within grabbing distance, yet almost blending into the wall when stored discreetly in its white holder.

If you have hard water (and more than three quarters of us do) it can interfere with laundry detergent’s ability to do its job. Add to that our propensity to overload the machine while also using less water per load and you have all the elements in place for lacklustre laundry. (I illustrated this story with a beautifully stocked linen closet, because you cannot overstate the satisfaction, nay, the joy of freshly washed and folded laundry.)

Downy Rinse & Refresh, ($8.99, grocery stores) is not a fabric softener. Rather its low pH helps lift product residue and by extension, bad smells from natural and synthetic fibres. So if your synthetic workout gear doesn’t smell as good as new despite repeated washings or your university-age children bring their laundry home, Rinse & Refresh could be for you. And the Fresh Lavender scent is wonderfully light and non-cloying.

Now that it gets dark by 5:00 p.m., it’s time to lay in an unholy number of votives (and it pains me to say this) but not the IKEA tea lights in their little tin sleeves. These Crate & Barrel votives, ($39.95, crateandbarrel.ca,) come 50 to a box and their sleeves are clear plastic, so when lit, the candles glow like little lanterns.

Extend the life of your wooden cutting boards, kitchen utensils and even that 70s wooden salad bowl if you have one. Clapham’s beeswax salad bowl finisher, ($23, Home Hardware) is a blend of naturally antibacterial beeswax and mineral oil which won’t go rancid like natural seed oils. It’s like moisturizer for your kitchen. Clapham’s is meditative pleasure to use, smells wonderful and brings all your kitchen bits back to life with a warm sheen.

Even if you can’t or won’t ‘Marie Kondo’ your lingerie and sock drawers into rigorous order, these Santa Maria Novella scented wax tablets impregnated with the citrus notes of Acqua Della Regina (classic eau de cologne), will make your jumble of socks and underwear smell very fancy. Queen Caterina de Medici would be very proud of you.

A ‘November Box’ For Hunkering Down in Style

The welcoming front hall in designer Rose Uniacke’s London home.

A November box is a collection of treats to help see you through the rain and chill of November, which is, in fact, the cruelest month, not April.

HomeCourt from Courteney Cox is a welcomed not reviled celebrity brand.

For those of us who don’t want our homes to smell like a giant synthetic lemon after we’ve cleaned, Homecourt surface cleaner, $20 US, (mine was a gift from a dear friend) is a revelation. So, thank you, Courteney Cox for launching scented homecare instead of yet another celebrity skincare line. Cece (one of four beautiful, non fake lemon scents) is gently smoky with cardamom, cinnamon and leather. It makes your living space smell like a mansion turned members-only club: all wood panelling and deep, down-filled chesterfields to lounge on in front of roaring fires as discreet staff bring you drinks and lovely nibbles on silver trays.

Vetiver is so smokily resinous, earthy and grounding in fragrances (like Chanel’s best in breed, Sycomore) that I never understood why there aren’t more vetiver candles. Diptyque’s Vetyver candle, $98, Holt Renfrew, is both grassy and evocative of a humid jungle but also cozy and wintery. And if you are in Toronto, head to Yorkdale Mall, because it houses Canada’s first freestanding Diptyque boutique. This, more than the coming downtown Nobu should truly make Toronto ‘world class’, yes?

It gets dark by 4:30 p.m., so celebrate that and have a drink. No, not alcohol. Chocolate! Specifically, SOMA chocolatemaker Dark Side of the Mug drinking chocolate, $8. Mixed into hot water (or hot milk if you are feeling flush) it will give you the serotonin you need in the darkness, as chocolate contains tryptophan, a precursor to serotonin. #betterlivingthroughscience.

It’s time to reread Nancy Mitford’s classic The Pursuit of Love before India Knight’s modern reworking, Darling is available in Canada. Luckily the modernized reimagining is getting good reviews, but the original, and its companion book, Love in a Cold Climate (same time frame, different characters) are worth an annual reread, or a first read if you have never had the pleasure.

Birkenstocks, my father’s favourite shoes, will one day return to being woefully out of style. But in the meantime, I am enjoying seeing bulbous-toed, jolie laide Bostons on the same people who, in 2016, wore furry Gucci Princetown slides. Shearling lined Birkenstock Bostons, $220, make cozy slippers and the closed toe hides the evidence if you’ve been skipping pedicures in the winter. Get the Black or the Mocha (dark brown) that are lined in dark shearling. The pale suede ‘mink’ ones are pretty but they’re lined in white shearling, which is impossible to keep clean and they will look shabby quickly despite your best efforts.

No need to fear the dry, moisture-sucking air this winter if you have this generously-sized jar of Laline Dead Sea Minerals Salt Scrub, in the shower (laline.ca, $45.) The fig and sandalwood scent is both brightly green and earthily soothing while the sea salt gently nudges away dead skin cells as the argan oil and glycerin soften your skin.

Bioderma Atoderm Cleansing Oil is Your Winter Skin Saviour

Bioderma Atoderm Ultra Nourishing Cleansing Oil will save your skin this winter.

Dermatologists must get so weary, telling us every year that hot showers are terribly drying to our skin. It’s advice we mostly ignore because, come winter, is there anything better than a quarter hour spent blissfully thawing out under a scalding spray?

Bioderma Atoderm Ultra Nourishing, Anti Irritation Cleansing Oil (Shoppers Drug Mart, $22.99) will save you from yourself when you decide to take up permanent residence in the shower. Its light fragrance is a faint echo of 1970s pearlized bath oil beads, while the coconut oil/glycerin formula gently cleanses without stripping skin or leaving you feeling overly greased up.

Atoderm helps your skin barrier stay strong to protect you from TEWL (trans-epidermal water loss) because dried out skin is itchy, uncomfortable and may be vulnerable to irritation which can lead to redness, cracking and inflammation.

When I’ve posted seasonal Atoderm reminders on Instagram in the past, in-the-know friends and colleagues unfailingly tell me that they have their requisite ‘one bottle on the go and one bottle on deck’. We’re a not-so-secret society of well-moisturized women who can now fearlessly face the dry air and winds that the coming season has to offer. Atoderm is that good. Ignore this edict at your own peril.

A ‘November Box’ of Seasonal Treats

Former Vogue Editor Tonne Goodman’s living room is cozy perfection.

The holidays are still pretty far away but we need some frivolity now. A November box, (see last year’s here) is a collection of treats you assemble to open on that first rainy, miserable November day. It can be anything you want, as long as it’s cheering.

The Santa Maria Novella terracotta pomegrante, $69 US., is what I call ‘stealth ubiquitous’. Once you know about it, you’ll see it everywhere in photos, quietly perched on a shelf or coffee table. Safer than a scented candle, this porous, terracotta fruit is soaked in scented oil so you can bring it home to release that signature Santa Maria Novella ‘Melograno’ scent. It’s powerful at first but dissipates to perfume rooms gently for at least a year after which it can live on in a closet.

And take some inspiration from Alex Eagle’s coffee table, below. If you stack all your books into piles, each topped with an objet, candle or ashtray, it immediately looks purposeful and tidy.

Santa Maria Novella’s pomegranate is only one of many delights on Alex Eagle’s coffee table.

The Uniqlo pale grey cashmere beanie, because each year we always forget how cold it gets.

Keep a Uniqlo cashmere beanie $39.90, at the ready for when the temps continue their downward trajectory. The navy blue is already sold out, but black, pale grey, cream and a whole raft of colours are still available. And you can’t beat the price for pure cashmere.

Serge Lutens Chergui Confit de Parfum perfumed oil, $195, Holt Renfrew, named after a Moroccan desert wind, reveals its secrets slowly. It’s like discovering your favourite elderly auntie was actually a member of the resistance who lured Gestapo agents to abandoned warehouses before shooting them. In a perfumed oil this means it starts all sweet and innocent and powdery with rose, iris and honey, before warming into a heady mix of leather, tobacco, musk and incense. World War two heroines aside, it’s the perfect scent if you’re tired of smelling like everyone else.

Oversized and singular with that crazy handle, this capacious and thick-walled Waverly mug from superstar interiors trendsetter Montana Labelle will add a cool, earthy vibe to your morning Nespresso.

Watching the venerable Italian nonne of Pasta Grannies make their own pasta like trofie with basil sauce (page 28) and potato gnocchi with tomato sauce (page 115) on YouTube is pure visual Xanax. The accompanying cookbook ensures that they are truly “saving traditions and sharing skills” while giving us some much-needed, comforting fall dinner inspiration.

Laboratoire Filorga’s Meso Mask, $75, Shoppers Drug Mart, calms redness in minutes and super-hydrates too, because we all know what’s going to happen to our poor skin when the air out there is both freezing and drying.

Lindt Excellence Orange Almond dark chocolate is a souped-up and tricked-out adult version of that Christmas stocking staple, the Terry’s chocolate orange. Stash one in your November Box and hopefully forget about it, so when you open the box, there will be #surprisechocolate for you to eat right away. it’s the edible equivalent to finding $20 in your coat pocket.

Aveeno Restorative Skin Therapy Soothes Itchy “Dragon Shins”

Aveeno Restorative Skin Therapy Itch Relief Balm is a descriptive, but not terribly fun, name.

In Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen famously tells Alice “it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.” Which, in menopause terms, means that after 50 you spend a lot more time moisturizing skin that now feels like it shrunk in the wash. Estrogen loss thins the skin at the same time as you’re losing collagen, losing moisture (thank you, slowed down lipid production) and losing all that juicy, subcutaneous fat.

Throw in the moisture-free, super-dry air of a classic Canadian winter and you have the recipe for the itchy skin that comes from a disrupted skin barrier made worse by scratching. This is dramatically visible on one’s shins - once gleamingly smooth and reflective, they are now rather scaly and dragon-ish.

You can’t just slap on thick cream and hope for the best. You need something that will strengthen your skin barrier and calm the itch, while feeling nice (otherwise you won’t actually use it.)

Right now, Aveeno Restorative Skin Therapy Itch Relief Balm, $9.77, Walmart, is the only thing preventing me from relentlessly clawing away at my itchy, dry shins. If I were in their marketing department, I would change the name to Aveeno Anti-Dragon Shin Balm, complete with a menacing dragon graphic wrapped around the tube.

This balm contains colloidal oatmeal, which not only “possesses antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties” to soothe inflammation, but oats are also a prebiotic, encouraging the proliferation of good, protective bacteria in your skin’s microbiome. Plus, for immediate itch relief, it also has the topical analgesic Pramoxine Hydrochloride, a light anesthetic (NOT a steroid) that effectively soothes your skin so you don’t scratch. Because it’s that wretched scratching that keeps the cycle of disruption going and prevents your skin from healing.

I’m not done with the dragon simile though. I’m going to hunt down a sticker of a dragon to put on my tube. My Covid lockdown-awakened obsession with childhood things continues apace.

A “November Box” is Critical For Your Winter Happiness

Kelly Klein’s Central Park West NYC apartment.

A November box is a hedge against winter gloom, prepared during the summer, and meant to be opened when temperatures plunge and it gets dark by 4:30 p.m. You assemble it in August (September at the absolute latest), when you are least inclined to think of winter, so that by the time you open it you’ve semi-forgotten what’s inside.

In the summer I only need full ice cube trays and a wide-brimmed hat, but winter calls for reinforcements, so I approach the coming season with the singleminded focus of a general preparing for battle.

I want my home to be a hybrid of fancy hotel (I like to aim high) and cozy nest. With that in mind, here is this year’s list (clockwise from upper right):

Central heating means you have to kick up the body moisturizing or suffer the itchy, uncomfortable consequences. I also like to add a couple of drops of James Read Click & Glow Gel Drops into my body lotion for some gradually developing colour. If you are pale verging-onto-greenish in the winter like me, some faux glow on your arms and legs will help them look less ghostly when they stick out of sleeves and from under blankets.

The bath needs to be a haven of good smells when nature and all living green things shut down for the season. Fredéric Malle’s Vetiver Extraordinaire body wash ($65 US) is headily resinous, faintly smoky and very green, like you’re hiking through a fragrant jungle. Vetiver is potent, but I don’t understand why it isn’t more widely used. It’s herbal and complex and earthy and I can’t live without it.

Obsessively doom-scrolling Twitter has destroyed my attention span, so it’s short stories only for the foreseeable future. Not only is there immense comfort in rereading old favourites, but as Nabokov observed “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” (meaning you only start to get it after the second or third time around.) If you haven’t read Nora Ephron’s feminist classic Crazy Salad and Dorothy Parker short stories since you were in school (or ever), now is the time.

Phlur’s Howl candle ($86 CAN) is actually named after Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem, not the wind that will be howling outside your windows this winter. Its tobacco, smoky oud and saffron blend will stand in for that roaring fire, while the spherical, lidded, porcelain jar becomes a sculptural catch-all after it’s finished.

This oversized jar of Body Shop’s Spa of the World French Grape Seed Body Scrub ($32 CAN) is a great-smelling jolt that will remind your senses that there is a living world outside, while also handily scrubbing away all the dead skin and leaving smoothness in its wake thanks to grape seed powder which is the perfect texture and offers the right degree of exfoliation. It’s not too rough but still does the job.

I am determined to keep seeing friends somehow over the winter and Yeti’s 30 oz rambler mug ($45) in brushed aluminum will keep my coffee really hot for socially-distanced dates in the frigid outdoors. (The Yeti also comes in bright colours, but ewww.)

Naadam’s kilo throw ($325 US) is 1000 grams of cashmere (my kind of weighted blanket) to hide under with your book. This is especially useful if you don’t in fact have a fireplace like Kelly Klein in her Central Park West apartment pictured above.

Atelier Cologne Iris Rebelle Smells Like My Dream Library

Iris Rebelle is a notional library made real

Spraying Atelier Cologne’s Iris Rebelle Cologne Absolue ($195, Sephora) is the olfactory equivalent of rereading an old favourite book while nestled in a library armchair. It’s such a wonderful fragrance that I’m baffled why it never got the adoration it deserves. (It launched in 2018.)

Iris Rebelle actually evokes old books: sweetish, and smelling vaguely like pencil shavings. (I mean this as a compliment, in case that wasn’t clear.) A 2009 study with the fantastic title “Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books”, describes that elusive book scent as “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.”

Apparently lignan, a component of wood-based (aka paper) books breaks down after years and begins to smell like vanilla. Iris Rebelle does not smell musty, but its black pepper and bergamot top notes might remind someone with an overactive imagination of degraded paper.

Add Iris and lavender for earthiness and soft powder, and then sit the whole affair atop a warm base of patchouli, woods and white musk. It’s the very embodiment of never-trying-too-hard elegance.

Iris as a perfume note is like the most complex violet ever. It deserves its own national holiday (ok, maybe not here but definitely in France) for the way it elevates everything it touches. It can be, by turn, powdery and romantic (Frederic Malle’s Iris Poudre), ethereally dusty and cozy (Floral Street Iris Goddess), or even sexy and startlingly metallic (Prada Infusion d’Iris). Or it can be like Iris Rebelle, which envelops you, saying ‘come sit and read and wait out the winter while smelling really really good.’