Holiday Cheer: Red Shoes by Fath Essentials

Well, the holidays are firmly upon us. Here in SoCal we have gone (or are repordedly going) from wet and rainy to picture perfect- the days should be flirting with 80 inland and the evenings cool, but not cold. Just the weather that used to lure people to the area back in the day when real estate was still relatively cheap- people would come out from Worcester or Wauwatosa or Wichita to visit Knotts Berry Farm or Disneyland or (now defunct and replaced by a Trump golf course) Marineland, pass a housing development in their shirtsleeves and rented Biscayne and think “why not?”

In short, it’s gorgeous.

So I will be spending my Christmas day with Ella Fitzgerald on the car CD player and taking a top-down spin along PCH. Maybe I’ll get a Santa Hat for the occasion. Or drive to Santa Barbara.

In the mean time I have been lazy as heck. I have a boatload of samples that I have purchased but not even really begun to explore (but I will, I will.) One of them- actually 12 of them, truth be told, are from Jacques Fath, who Portia wrote about which forced me to get an full bottle unsniffed of Lilas Exquis. Commenter Maya wrote that for 5 Euros plus shipping you could get samples of the whole magilla from their website. Shipping costs are a bit of a pain, but it’s not going to him and the samples are practically free. And it’s Christmas. So I ordered.

Red Shoes was the first one I tried and I kind of stopped at it. I’d wear it a day, wear something else, reach for a different sample, then reach for Red Shoes and re-spritz. Not because I couldn’t make up my mind about it- I really like it a lot. Which is strange because the list of notes should send me fleeing: it’s all listed as berries and grapefruit and aldehydes, oh my! Those of us who lived through the fruity-floral horror of the aughts are perhaps scarred by the experience and skittish when presented with those notes- I know I am. But the berries here are the tart kind and the grapefruit is as well- pithy and thankfully for once not sugared and broiled like a 50’s dessert. The roses, geranium, pepper and musk join in, but those tart berries are always there and I am glad of it. I hate to say this while there are 10 other samples in the bunch I have not smelled but I may need a full bottle of this one..

Red Shoes is available at the Fath Website, where with the favorable exchange rate at the moment you can get 100ML (and free shipping) for what Neiman Marcus charges for 50. I purchased my sample pack from the Fath Website. Photos are from Pixels and my iPhone.