photo of and by: Kathleen Drier
While enjoying my morning tea, this came in from Esens Custom Fragrance's Kathleen Drier:
"Today, Esens Custom Fragrances is featured in the Wall Street Journal! Mid-last week a man from Florida ordered a rushed Valentine's fragrance for his wife....so to me it was a normal order. On Monday night after she received it, he emailed me to tell me - much to my surprise - that he was a writer for the WSJ and he was completing an article on perfumes for Valentine's Day."
Wall Street Journal's Charles Passy had this to say:
"At Esens, an Arizona-based company headed by Kathleen Dreier, the process involved answering an online questionnaire and even sending a picture of the fragrance recipient. (To her credit, Ms. Dreier also inquires if the recipient has any allergies.)
For $100, Ms. Dreier delivered a small (less than a half-ounce) glass bottle of fragrance "essence" (again, a fairly concentrated oil). The packaging had a certain New Age-y quality—the fragrance was accompanied by a hand-written gift card with a photo of a flame. Ms. Dreier even came up with a name for our scent—"Lakshmi"—after "the Hindu goddess of prosperity, purity and generosity," she explained. We liked that the fragrance itself combined scents both familiar (again, jasmine and gardenia) and unfamiliar (oak moss) to us. The result was an exotic scent with something of a mystical quality—maybe not the recipient's exact personal style, but somewhat appealing all the same."
