Century XXI

You know the question that haunts any fragrance enthusiast: "What is your favorite?" Impossible to answer, no? Don't I love all my obsessions equally? Today I learned, perhaps not. Maybe I love Century XXI more than others, maybe I love it more than all. If scent is therapeutic, Century is absolution. I feel touched by the divine, I feel love quickening and pure, I feel angels humming my truest name in perfect harmony. It would be reductive to call this a spa scent, although it does possess some markers of a paramount spa experience: fragrant sandal and mellow cedar woods, lightly smoking incense--just enough to obscure any worldly worries from mind--luxurious natural fibers encasing your skin like a silk cocoon, you are being prepared to emerge a higher being. I feel poetic, relaxed, loving, anticipatory... all the telltale signs of falling in love. Heavens, hear this prayer: bless this bliss, make it mine forever. Amen.

Century XXI is ushering me into the grounded future of our new realities riding a fine line between aroma-molecule and natural atmosphere. This fragrance gives me a new modernity without being nu-age-ey. I agree 100 with the first reviewer on a kind of spiritual environment the notes bring into my psyche, like a spirituality that makes space for the complexities and trappings of material culture in the most exciting way. For me this is a fragrance that both allows me to focus and work, with an eye to staying open to new connections. This Canadian indie perfume is rocking my world this week as we get some cooler weather and I'm in and out of the garden between digital projects.

i am actually kind of floored. i got this scent in the discovery set, as a sort of last-minute tack-on. i didn't think i'd like it all too much, as i don't tend to love sandalwood scents. boy was i mistaken. i find myself reapplying this throughout the day, wishing i had gotten a full-size bottle. sure, it's sandalwood, but the violet really comes through and it all lays upon a bed of something creamy and beautiful and sweet. it's a first date, i'm nervous because i really want to impress them, but at the same time, like, they asked me out, right? i should have fun. i'm fun, sexy and confident. i don't know if i believe it or if i just really, really want to.

This fragrance is simultaneously so familiar and so mysterious. It reminds me a little bit of so many perfumes that I love, but yet it doesn't smell exactly like anything else. I keep thinking I pick up on certain new notes that I never noticed before, and then they escape me. Every time I wear it, it adapts to whatever I'm feeling; on a sunny day, it feels sultry; on a cold, crisp day it feels like all the coziness I need. What a perfect name for this fragrance! The century where old becomes new again, glimpses of different pasts show up for fleeting moments, always moving and evolving on to something else, known but unknown. That is this scent to me.

I get retro vibes in a good way, drag queen with big purple hair and orange go go boots, disco chic bell bottoms and platform sandals, conversation pit in the living room. Throw your keys in the jar, everybody is looking their finest tonight.The first notes of sweet violet give way to the creamy sandalwwood, this fragrance isn't flashy. It smells like a calm, quiet confidence about the future, like sometime before the internet when it feelt like things were going to work out just fine.