Penhaligon's Castile

When I was in my 20s and living in London, my friend Georgie used to make fun of me for “matching” my food. She noticed that I'd pair my Swiss Miss instant hot chocolate orange cocoa with chocolate orange candy straws, and did the same with hot chocolate mint cocoa and chocolate mint candy straws. And there was also the matter of my insisting on butterscotch sauce with butterscotch ice cream. I'd countered that the Brits were no strangers to food matching with their famous chip butty. For the blissfully uninitiated, a chip butty is a greasy pile of steak fries between two slices (or three!) of white bread. In other words, starch on starch.

"Umm...no thanks -- I just ate."

I thought of food matching for the first time in years when I smelled Penhaligon's Castile. Castile's particular charm comes from its layering of many iterations of fresh-scrubbed orange: neroli, petitgrain, bergamot, orange blossom. Talk about smell matching! The key to Castile is the interplay between all the shades of orange, and musk, which provides just enough “grrr” to bridge all that clean sunshine to the physicality of your own sweet self. Because without any contrast, you'd never know what you were smelling -- or eating -- as I discovered as my enthusiasm for food matching waned.

Castile is available from LuckyScent.com at $110 for 100 ml

See my discussion of Castile in my Seduction Scents post.