Guest Post from Left Coast Nose - Penhaligon's Lily and Spice

It's a great pleasure to have Left Coast Nose guest blogging here today. Thanks Left Coast Nose for all your work in putting together a great guest post!

Penhaligon “Lily & Spice” ***

Well, I was just tickled pink to be asked by Jessica to guest blog today—nice to get out of foggy San Francisco and head on over to sunny, swingin’ London. (I wish I were there for real!!)

Nothing says “SignatureScent” like some shopping snaps (I swear, Jess—your blog is a wicked good on-going ad to see the world and buy stuff!!) So here are a few pix of my fair city and our shopping possibilities. Here is the southwest corner of the world shopping Mecca, Union Square. (You can see that somebody left their heart right there.)

Here are the gates to Maiden Lane, right off the square, where some of the most posh boutiques lurk.

They have everything you need to shop there, including food: 

Fragrance: 

And fashion:

San Francisco is pretty swell, but we don’t have the plethora of home-grown scent-meisters like London does. In a cultural-exchange swap for a bunch of CB I Hate Perfumes, Jess was sweet enough to send me this *fabulous* tin of Penhaligon samples:

So pretty!! I haven’t tried them all yet, but I took a crack at “Lily & Spice,” and let me tell you—I loved what I smelled.

I find lily, like most of the indole flowers to be difficult—usually too sweet. And initially, L&S is quite sweet. The strong true lily dies off in 5 minutes or so, however, and once it stabilizes, the lovely spice elements emerge: clove, pepper, and a fabulous, sassy saffron. The structure reminds me of one of my all time favorite scents: Kenzo “Unidentified Fragrance Object.” (Stupid name—great scent.) UFO is super simple and straightforward: vanilla + frankincense. The vanilla gives the frankincense softness, the frankincense gives the vanilla structure.

That’s how I encounter L&S: softly sweet, but the spices give it balance, heft, and fire. Yum!! The whole scent is quiet—I would say that it’s saturated at about a 3 on a scale from 1 to 10 and deliciously refined. (I’d call it a “rich-lady” scent—do with that what you will.)

I’m always happy to encounter a happy scent—even better when it gives me a chance to talk about my dog!! After all, what would a SignatureScent posting be without a gratuitous adorable baby shot?

All of my babies have four legs and fur. Here’s a recent snap of Lily, our newest—we adopted her last October.

Lily is a rescue dog, so she’s got lots of mysteries about her, including her lineage and her age. She’s mostly poodle, weighs about 10 pounds, sports a 1” afro all over her body, and is a total clown. I say she looks like a sheep and hops like a bunny. She is famously shameless, going into what we call “The Dinner Dance” right on time every night at 5:05. (Doggy dinner is technically at 5:30, so the last 25 minutes become a test of wills: can we both avoid going anywhere near the kitchen and put up with all the hysteria, or do we just break down and feed them? Every night, it’s the same…)

And if you needed any more connection to the name “Lily & Spice,” check her out in her bespoke rainbow leg-warmers knit by her Auntie Jasmine: Hot stuff!!

She loves her fashion—she is French, you know.

Thanks again for the chance to guest-post, Jessica, and I’ll be back home at my regular site on Thursday. Cheers!