I am going to apologize right now, and repeatedly throughout the course of this posting, for the quality of the photographs. I took them myself (strike one), in a hotel room with indifferent lighting (strike two), using a bedspread as a backdrop (strike you get the picture), editing them minimally on a useful but dinky netbook computer (strike et cetera).
Now that that's temporarily out of the way:
Today, Day 4 in New York, I went to Hermes on Madison Avenue. I could probably have spent half an hour there, no problem (among other things I would like to have been able to compare and contrast Rouge Hermes and Parfum D'Hermes, and try the Extrait version of Terre D'Hermes), but I promised Jim that I would be there for an absolute maximum of five minutes, and I doubt he believed me (knowing me as well as he does), but I did it. I found my quarry, pounced on it, and brought it down in record time (for me). What I was after was the Hermessences Discovery Set, which contains the first four scents in the line. (If there had been a second set containing scents 5 through 8, I suspect I would have bought that, too.)
Whenever a new Apple product comes out, some people make a big deal about unboxing it, taking apart the packaging (which is always well-designed and interesting), removing the various contents, and documenting the whole process. So let's have a go at that.
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This is what I brought home with me: an Hermes shopping bag in the familiar house colours of orange and brown. The bag has a nice pebbly leather-like texture.
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What's in the bag? No samples: I wanted some of the newer Hermessences but she had none (and opened a cabinet to prove the point), just samples of the ones I was already buying. Oh, well. But the credit-card slip was tucked into a smart little folder of heavy card with a heavily embossed linen texture. Class all the way.
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Also inside the bag: a lovely box, again in the house colours, again with that same pebbled leather finish. The charming saleswoman opened a drawer and removed the box, which was in a white cardboard sleeve bearing the name of its contents: she discarded this sleeve as being unworthy. Then at the cash she took a length of brown ribbon and tied up the box. The ribbon is woven but the stitching along the edges and the logo and name are printed on it; however, they're nicely printed in very heavy three-dimensional ink.
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Another view of the box, because why not. Since it's Jim's netbook computer and he was resizing the photos for me, I think this was probably the point at which he said, "I have
got to teach you how to take photos." They are pretty awful, aren't they?
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The box, unribboned and ready to be opened to the world.
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This is what is inside the box: four little drawstring bags in a very smart linen-coloured tweed.
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And also a little booklet: the cover is two rectangles of heavy card in that same leather finish, glued to each end of an accordion-folded length of translucent paper printed with information about the Hermessence line and the various scents in it. I believe this is the point at which, in despair at the general awfulness of the images, Jim said, "Look,
I'll take the pictures over again for you." But I thought he had probably done enough for me, so I declined.
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Here is one of the 15-mL bottles, of Rose Ikebana, with the other three still in their pouches. The bottom of the slim squarish bottle has a little glaze of red-pink which shows up when you look at it from the front; the name is printed on the bottle in a similar shade. You don't get any sense of scale from this picture, but since the bottle holds a tablespoonful, you can imagine that it is not very big; the perfect size for tossing into your luggage.
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And here are all four of the bottles. As you can see, they are all glazed at the bottom with a little smudge of an appropriate colour: dark red-brown for Poivre Samarkande, fresh bright yellow-green for Vetiver Tonka, and intense gold for Ambre Narguile, which I
already reviewed some months ago. I swore I was going to buy some last time I was in New York, but events conspired against me (basically, we stopped by the Hermes boutique on Sunday, a day on which it is closed, and I just never got back to it). This time, the fates were a little kinder, and I so have my Ambre Naguile, and three more besides.
And that's not all! Stay tuned....
Labels: Shopping