Penhaligon’s
If you want to smell like Winston Churchill - and you must be thinking, Who wouldn’t! - this is the place to visit.
Penhaligon’s has nine shops in London (I visited the one in Chelsea) and has been making aromatic concoctions since Queen Victoria’s time when William Penhaligon was barber and perfumer to the royal court.
Penhaligon’s signature fragrance is Bluebell, which, despite head notes of citrus and base notes of clove and cinnamon, smells exactly like a bouquet of bluebells. Bluebells are in the hyacinth family, which is why I kept thinking “spring bulbs’’ whenever I smelled the tester. Intriguingly, supermodel Kate Moss and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reportedly wear the fragrance, but on me it resembled a very nice air freshener.
Other fragrances were more layered, such as Quercus, a delicate, spicy, citrus-basil combination that straddles the line between perfume and cologne, and the century-old (it was created in 1910) fresh and earthy English Fern, also purportedly for men and women.
Churchill wore Blenheim Bouquet. The “bracing mix of citrus oils, spices, and woods,’’ with base notes of “pine, musk, and black pepper’’ was created in 1902 and is still available.
Miller Harris
I fell in love with Miller Harris’s Citron Citron soap before I ever went to London, courtesy of a stay at The Fairmont Dallas hotel, which carried the line.
Compared with Penhaligon’s, Miller Harris is a relative newcomer (it was founded in 2000 by Lyn Harris), and there are three shops in London. I visited the flagship (which is actually a cozy boutique) at 21 Bruton St., near the insanely luxurious shops of New Bond Street in Mayfair.
Their floral scents are somewhat literal for my taste: Noix de Tubéreuse smells, well, like tuberoses, and Coeur de Fleur is extremely sweet. Feuilles de Tabac is more masculine with an unabashedly smoky, woody fragrance, and Figue Amère is another woody fragrance inspired by bitter, ripe, green figs.
