Shalimar, Holidays and Cake Shops

Is there anything new to say about a scent invented the best part of a century ago? I shall give it a try.
Cake shops. Specifically French ones, patisseries with tartes tatins, vanilla slices and macaroons in unexpected colours.

There were perfumes, yes. Mostly people used them to disguise the scent of not washing very often. We like to forget this now, and think of fragrance as something to add at the last moment to complement our outfits (or lack thereof). At the time, people didn't bathe that often. Right until the 1950s there were children sewn into their clothes for the winter, in England. Really. (My mum taught some of them and reported that as they approached March the smell in the classroom was "ripe".)

Scent was used as a disguise, not as the added extra we enjoy now.

So there we were, with ladies wafting around in lavender, neroli, rose, violet, orris (the classic "powdery" scent as face and powders were traditionally perfumed with orris root from iris plants) and suddenly M. Guerlain creates an aroma of cake shops and you're supposed to wear it! Did Marcel Proust smell it? I do hope so. It would have been enough to make him take to his bed for a month while he came to terms with his confused emotions.

Spending two weeks in France, wearing Shalimar, staying in the Guerlain seaside holiday home and eating lots of ice cream, I've embedded the fragrance; it now reminds me of feeling relaxed and happy. So what's your holiday scent?

Shalimar By Guerlain For Women. Eau De Parfum Spray 1.0 Oz.

Pierre Guerlain's House by the Seaside

This is Pierre Guerlain's 19th Century house by the sea, on the Somme Estuary in a little town called Le Crotoy, Picardie. Pierre Guerlain was the founder of the perfume dynasty, and perfumer to the French imperial family. He had the house built expecting a visit from the Empress Eugenie, but she never turned up.

It's now an eco hotel, Les Tourelles, about an hour from Boulogne if you take the quick route. (There are two turrets, it's just that the second one is directly behind the first so you can't see it here.)

The restaurant is a delight, and specialises in seafood, naturally enough, although now the Euro is so wickedly powerful against the pound, if you want to eat there you just have to pretend it's Monopoly money.

That's the view from our window.


The beach is perfect for sandcastles, fine and slightly muddy, a blend of estuary clay and thousands of years of ground up sea shells. The British were out there every day with their buckets and spades building and rebuilding elaborate defences. The bird sanctuary opposite is the temporary home to thousands of shrieking gulls in the far distance.

So the only little problem I had with visiting Pierre Guerlain's former home, a hotel which my wonderful chap hand picked for me because I love perfume, is that there is not one single reference to the chap, his work, his legacy or that he ever lived there at all. The tourist centre has nothing about him. A street is named after him, but otherwise, not a thing. I wore Shalimar, but that was the only olfactory echo of his family's work I could find in the place. Perhaps we're the only people ever to visit specifically in search of perfume history.

If I lived there, I'd open a specialist perfumery and inhale the same sea air as Monsieur Guerlain, then see what inspiration followed.

PS Beware of idiot Englishmen who don't realise that eco hotels don't have air conditioning.