Spring Into Fall: DSH Perfumes Soho Boheme

Well, Fall has finally arrived here in LA. For now anyway- it could get back up into the 90’s at any moment and there are quite a few X-Mas holidays where the Beverly Center’s Hunky Santa needed to be shirtless.

But that time hasn’t arrived yet. Right now it’s brisk- in the 60’s during the day and down nearly to freezing in the foothills at night. The north of the state is supposed to get something called a “Bomb Cyclone” of heavy rain but that won’t come that far South- we aren’t even expecting sprinkles.

But what that does mean is that I want to get some of the more comforting, nubby sweater by the fire sort of scents. But not too “seasonal” or too obviously “comforting”. I don’t want any pumpkin-spice Hallmark Channel overtones.

Dawn Spencer Hurwitz in for the win!

Dawn doesn’t get nearly enough love here on the blogs and that’s too bad. There are a lot of small, “hyper-niche” perfumers out there who aren’t just trolling for a buyout from LVMH and aren’t going to be at Nordstrom (not that I don’t appreciate, love, and even happily own some of the products of those guys) any time soon but do what they do well.

DSH does her wares very well indeed.

Soho Boheme is a leather chypre in the vein of Bandit, with overtones of Kolnisch Juchten’s slightly fatted roundness, smoky black tea, and gardenia that manages to be both as sultry as something Germaine Cellier would have done and as blameless and innocent as a Caswell-Massey. It’s a chic, New York sort of comfort: running around on a blustery day picking up cheese at Murrays and cider donuts at Migliorelli’s in the Union Square Farmers Market before stocking up on deli from Katz’s for the Sunday to come. There’s a passage in Rosemary’s Baby where Rosemary, newly pregnant, runs errands all over the city despite having stores that she could have gotten done in her Lincoln Square neighborhood because (paraphrasing) she wanted to feel the city around her, her scarf and coat flying out behind her as she strode the streets, the bracing air stinging her face, feeling coolly competent in her knowledge of the city and where exactly to get what she wanted and needed.

That feeling is Soho Boheme.

Soho Boheme is not loud- you will have to lean in to smell it (no bad thing, that) and it has very good lasting power. While I have not lived in New York since before the turn of the millennium (and have no real desire to do so again) on a chilly day like today where I might have to (gasp) turn on the heated seats when I brave the mean Hills of Beverly in search of convenient parking near Erewhon and Nate ‘n Al’s a spritz of this makes me feel a bit cool and confident as well as a bit Boho Chic.

Soho Boheme is available in many sizes and products from a $30 mini-roll-on to a $235 69ML perfume spray, the latter I see in my future. My sample was purchased at the perfumers website.

Photos: my iPhone, Pexels and Wikimedia Commons.