Throughout fashion month, we’ll be focusing our attention on the backstage creatives and the fragrances they’re choosing to wear throughout the shows (and beyond).
First up, make-up maestro and UK Colour Artist for Clinique, Florrie White – renowned for such colourful catwalk beauty gestures as the flutters of pastel which adorned the eyes of the autumn/winter 2014 Meadham Kirchhoff girl – talks us through her ever-blossoming passion for rose-based fragrances…
‘I can’t pinpoint a particular moment I first fell in love with scent, as it’s always been present in my life, whether it was my mother’s, grandmother’s or elder sister’s: they each had individual signature scents which were (and are) always comforting. My first scent memory was of my mother dressing up in the 70s; I would watch her apply make-up – and then she and my father would head out in an exotic cloud of patchouli and jasmine.
Scent is so individual as it smells differently on everyone. It is also an essential extravagance. I was born in June and I like to think that is why I love the scent of roses which are in bloom around my birthday. I stop to smell them in people’s front gardens and have a wardrobe of rose-based scents – my favourite at the moment is Clinique Beyond Rose which also has notes of amber. The bottle is stunning on my dressing table!
Applying scent makes me feel fully dressed, even if it’s the only thing I’m wearing. I would feel naked without it. The first ever fragrance I coveted was worn by a 6th Former at boarding school when I was 13. I thought she was the coolest girl: she wore lots of eyeliner and always had the best-looking boyfriends. She wore a heady musky scent that would linger seductively long after she waltzed down the long corridors to meet her latest beau. She named her daughter Florrie – so the admiration was mutual, it seems…!’
Twitter: @florriewhite
Written by Alice Jones
