Challenge yourself with today's puzzles.
E
very so often in life it is important to treat yourself to a minor but crucial upgrade. Something indulgent — frivolous even — but a genuine step up from your regular day-to-day. It’s not the carefully planned bucket-list trip to Machu Picchu via hot-air balloon, nor the dream home with the his’n’hers helipads. It’s a micro-luxury. Something within reach — which you could, should you so choose, treat yourself to right now.
So how about home fragrances — because what is smell if not the most fundamental and evocative of the senses?
The perfume of a college fling during the lazy summer of my A-levels (a sweet, synthetic strawberry); the aroma in the lobby of the Edition hotel in New York, which I first inhaled when I was sent there in 2017 on an unusually glamorous writing assignment (custom Le Labo, the concierge told me — its Thé Noir is the closest you’ll find in the wild); the delicate scent pumped out in industrial quantities from every branch of the global sandwich chain Subway (eau de BMT, I believe it’s known as) — these are the things that evoke Proustian raptures and Pavlovian physical reactions.
