Today's Tip
French homes smell of one thing. Not a cocktail of plug-ins and candles and sprays. One considered scent, subtle enough that you notice it only when you enter. The French approach to home fragrance is restraint applied to the invisible layer of a room.
Try This
Identify every artificial scent currently in your home: candles, diffusers, sprays, cleaning products. Remove all but one. Choose the one you would keep if you could only keep one. Let a week pass. Your home will smell more like itself, and the one scent you kept will mean more.
French parfumeurs use the term "sillage" to describe the trail a scent leaves — its projection and persistence in the air. For home fragrance, the French prefer low sillage: a scent that does not precede or outlast you in a room but simply lives quietly within it. The cultural preference for subtlety extends to the home. A house that announces its scent from the doorway is considered aggressive. A house that reveals it only on entry is considered composed. Both are choices about what you project to others.
One French lifestyle tip, every morning at 7am. Free — always.