Jola V Designs- Handmade Handbags From Vancouver

Here's a great example for social media at its best. A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. I reached for my laptop, checked my email, glanced at the usual forums and then Twitter. A tweet by Ayala Sender of Ayala Moriel  Perfumes caught my eye. It had nothing to do with natural perfumery but linked to an Etsy store of a Vancouver-based handbag designer. The result of that nightly tweet-and-shop was the bag above.

The thing about Jola V Designs is that these purses are not made of new leather. All the leather is re-claimed, re-purposed or surplus stock. Everything is handmade with the utmost attention to details. They try to make as little waste as possible during production, and most scraps are turned into small accessories, such as coin purses (see photo) or decorative details.

The things that especially caught my eye in this specific bag were the vintage print of the lining and the braided double strap which isn't just beautiful, but also very comfortable to carry (there's also a long single strap that allows for wearing across the body). The cute dust bag was a welcome surprise, as I prefer to store my purses in such bags.

It's such a luxurious item- something that's exquisitely made and will never appear in mass quantities at local department stores before being relegated to discount chains. The design and details are unique, so I'll never see someone carrying an exact copy that was purchased for fraction of the price from a street vendor selling counterfeit items. Looking at the seams, the finish and the lining, it's clear no shortcuts were taken. Unless one can afford to get on Hermes Birkin waitlist, this is as sumptuous as it gets. Amazingly, the prices are very reasonable: from $99 to $280 for a full size leather bag. There are also smaller accessories, such as the very sexy Ball &Chain wrist bag that attaches to your arm with a leather cuff.

Jola V Designs can be found in this Etsy store (I have no commercial interest here and was not compensated in any way for this review. The link is for your convenience only).

All photos are mine.

Ayala Moriel Parfums- Roses et Chocolat

A couple of years ago I had a wonderful dessert at a downtown restaurant. It was a fragrant chai bread pudding with dark chocolate chips. It was so wonderful that the following weekend the husband and I tried to recreate it at home and fairly succeeded. The most memorable part of baking the pudding was the scent that filled the house- the mixture of spice, milk and chocolate. Smelling Ayala Moriel's Roses et Chocolat, a perfume originally created for Valentine's Day, reminds me of that aroma.

Roses et Chocolat is a spicy gourmand with a nice dose of a very dark rose. I'm usually not a rose person, but these are rich red roses that absorb the spice and never turn sour. Instead there's velvety smoothness that is sexy and tempting, like the perfect red lipstick and lacy lingerie. The chocolate doesn't hurt this image, either. There's a sensuality of opening a luxurious box of handmade truffles and picking them one by one- some are filled with rose cream, others with allspice and nutmeg.

Roses et Chocolat is a parfum extrait, so no wonder it feels so luxurious. Ayala Moriel Parfums is an all-natural line by Vancouver-based perfumer Ayala Sender. These perfumes are the real thing and have the kind of depth we often wish to find in fragrance and rarely do nowadays. It reminds us that perfume can be a true luxury and not just a lab product. What could be better for Valentine's Day?

Roses et Chocolat ($110, 9 ml, currently on a seasonal discount for $99. The scent also comes in travel size and assorted other products) can be purchased from ayalamoriel.com. I've been testing a nice sample set that my husband bought me a few months ago.

In which I go to sephora...

...and save you the trouble.

I'll start with the non-perfume findings, because those are way more positive. And also because it's my turn to add a cent or two of my thoughts to the much talked about Wall Street Journal article. Since it relates nicely to my Sephora visit, I'll get to it shortly.

Bath and Body
There are more and more Korres products. I've been a fan for years, while the line was still a bit obscure and hard to find (now it seems to be everywhere) around here, and the only product was the Guava body butter, which was superb once you figured that it's best to use it right after the shower, while the bathroom is still steamy and your skin absorbs it right away.
The line has grown, adding more scents and more products. I was very eager to try the newish fig scent, but while the products' texture is as great as always, it doesn't smell all that figgy and rich as I hoped. I'm not sure exactly what it smells like. Something herbal but sweet, maybe. I wasn't all too impressed with the Quince, either.

The good news is that there are more products in the Korres Yogurt range, and just like the famous cooling gel, they feel great on the skin. There's a yogurt buddy butter and I couldn't be happier. The very delicate scent might be my favorite of them all.

I was very interested in the Ren line. It sounds promising, the packaging is modern and unisex, and most of all they declare "clean, plant-based ingredients—and free of all unfriendly ones like petrochemicals, synthetic dyes, and parabens" and claim to be eco-friendly and socially conscious. Looking at the ingredient lists of the products, it seems they actually deliver on the promise. I only quickly sampled a few creams and lotions, and while the textures seem nice, the scents are off-putting. Very surprising to get such an unpleasant "pharmacy" whiff from something that is made of plant extracts and oils.

Makeup
The Union Square store now has a Guerlain stand. This is a great improvement considering the increasing floor space that is given to brands that cater to the glitter-loving demographic. You'll find the Terracotta line and all the gorgeous lip and face products.

I mostly skip the holiday collections because they tend to suck almost as bad as the spring ones (too much glitter in the former and a pink orgy in the latter). But there are a couple of notable limited edition items that are available right now that are quite interesting, holiday or not and it is worth checking them out:

Smashbox has a new Sephora exclusive limited edition kit, Platinum Surge, a $110 value for $39. It's not part of the official Beyond Beauty Holiday 2007 collection, but with the super-shiny glosses it might as well be. The two lip products are the weak part of this kit, if you ask me. I was far more impressed by the eyeshadow quad and the SoftLights compact, both are quite classy and elegant.

Dior's Detective Chic Eye Palette is a gorgeous collection of six eyeshadows, most are dark, deep but muted and wearable colors, all are very pigmented and fine-textured. The quality is superior, as always with this brand. The case is stylish and as Dior as it can get.

Perfume
Insert deep sigh.
It wasn't that long ago that Sephora's perfume section had quite a few interesting brands and larger selection within each of them. It also wasn't always cotton candy central.

I went through several new and newish releases, most I've already tried once or twice and dismissed, but wanted to give everything another chance. I used every piece of skin I could expose without getting arrested, with a couple of cleansing breaks in between. Here are the highlights:

L.A.M.B by Gwen Stefani- It's not the worst I've come across, which is a lot for a fruity floral. The combination of greens and a non-candied pear is pleasant. It's girly, inoffensive and unoriginal (notice how many negatives in one short paragraph? That's exactly the problem: a scent that's defined by what it isn't instead by what it is).

Fendi Palazzo- Why bother? The top notes are almost interesting with a sweet and peppery touch, but every time I tried it on hoping for the best because of my love for the house of Fendi, it dried down to a musky nothing with a hint of cheap smelling woods. And we know it won't last: In a year it'll be available from all the discounters and then discontinued and replaced with another nondescript scent and a big marketing blitz. Bring Theorema back.

At the recommendation of Dain, I gave a good try to Givenchy Hot Couture. It's quite different than most other Givenchy offerings (all those Very Irresistible flankers). It's sweet, girly and much more pleasing than most fruity florals, despite the raspberry note. From what I can gather, there has been a reformulation somewhere along the lines, and the old EdP is superior to the current EdP. What else is new?

Maitresse from Agent Provocateur is far less provocative and daring than the original. Instead of a saffron-laced chypre, here we get a musky floral. Easier on the nose? Maybe. Also boring as hell.

Midnight Poison (Dior)- Good intentions and a synthetic ambery rose do not a good perfume make.

My Insolence (Guerlain)- What's a Guerlain perfume without the Guerlinade base? Yes, I get that they're trying to reach a young audience whose biggest fear is to smell like an old lady and biggest desire is to smell like fruit. I don't have to like it, though.


It's sad, really. Sniffing and looking at all these perfumes you just know that most of them will not survive five years on the market. Even sadder to me is remembering that most of these come from houses that stand for luxury, but there's nothing even remotely upscale and special in these products (I'm reading Deluxe by Dana Thomas and it's worth discussing here soon, for this very reason).

We didn't need the WSJ article to tell us that the designer market is in trouble. We can smell it. The best perfumes Sephora has to offer right now may be the Chanel and Hermes scents, but all of them are cheapened reformulated EdTs, far inferior to the original extraits, bottled and boxed to sell many and quickly at the expense of quality and integrity.

Ayala Sender in her SmellyBlog is saddened and appalled to learn that there's no artistic vision even behind the exclusive ranges some of these big houses are launching. Only a cold calculation from a marketing point of view. I'd still take those, as long as they truly are made to be of better quality and with an actual intent to create an excellent perfume, but I do know what Ayala is talking about: Why should we even bother with Armani Privé , Tom Ford Private blend or Chanel Les Exclusifs when we can get the real thing, made by real artists and visionaries? Serge Lutens, Andy Tauer, Frederic Malle, Pierre Guillaume and many others (including Ayala herself) still love what they do and are putting everything they can into their bottles. The article doesn't mention the niche market at all, probably because it's such a small one that it doesn't really count in an $18 billion market. But there is an alternative to those ladies who spray us at the department stores, and I hope more and more perfume lovers realize it and go niche.