Jo Malone Wood Sage and Sea Salt launch party

On Thursday I headed over to Jo Malone in the Victoria Quarter for the Wood Sage and Sea Salt launch party.  I love just going into Jo Malone – I worked there as a Christmas temp a few years ago, and coming home covered in those smells made every hour of work worthwhile!  The staff are so behind the brand that they can sell you the luxury without even trying.  You have me with those creamy boxes.

If you don’t know the Jo Malone London brand, they are a British-made olfactory experience you need to get onboard with! For me, they are just synonymous with utter luxury. Many of the products are astronomically expensive, but really, the perfumes aren’t so bad – the 30ml perfumes are £40, the 100ml are £82.  That does seem an awful lot, but when you compare that to Chanel No.5 at around £95 for 100ml, and Hermes Eau des Merveilles (my most desired scent for Winter right now!) at £79 for 50ml, you realise that, actually, their prices are nearer the bottom end of the luxury market for what they offer.

Wood Sage and Sea Salt is inspired by English beaches, and the photography uses the Northumbrian coastline as a backdrop. Northumbria is close to my heart – we have gone to Northumbria as a family since before I was born, pretty much annually. I love Italy, I love warmth, I love exotic, new places – but if I could only choose one place to go on holiday to ever again, it would be the beautiful coastguard cottage we have always stayed in in Northumberland.

Lots of ladies came for the launch; there were only two gents.  Mine was none too chuffed with this turn of events.  Our conversations usually go something like this – me: “smell this one, it smells just like tomatoes growing in a greenhouse!” him: “so why would you buy a perfume of it? Just go and sniff a greenhouse”…he is not entirely easy to persuade.  But eventually he was peer-pressured into joining me for a hand and arm massage.

The girls were spritzing the gorgeous mix of bergamot, sea salt and sage all the time, and I definitely fell for it. I am a sucker when it comes to a good smell.  The beauty of Jo Malone is that the scents are quite pure and not over-worked, so most of the time you can find a great fragrance match from within the arc to make something even more unique and personal to you!

With our “aye aye cap’n!”scent bracelets well spritzed, everyone wandered about, looking at all the products on offer.  You can also gauge what the rich people in your area look like, for future reference, which is quite an interesting exercise in itself – Jo Malone always attracts people with lots of money, and then a few suckers who don’t have any money but buy it anyway – people like me.

With the champagne flowing, as well as Rococo salted caramel “gull eggs” to crack into, I got completely on-brand again, spritzing everything and sampling all the fragrance combinations I could envisage going well with the new scent. Nutmeg and Ginger was a great combiner, but what I was looking for is whether it would go with Blackberry and Bay.  That’s the scent I’m wearing for the wedding.

The fragrance arc had lots of smells to tempt me, but Blackberry and Bay is still my firm favourite. I love English Pear and Freesia, for a British, Springtime wedding, but Blackberry and Bay is perfect for this temperamental British Autumn.

I have the body creme and the fragrance in Blackberry and Bay, so can layer these on first (using a scented moisturiser too makes your perfume last so much longer on the skin) and then spritz the Wood Sage over the top at the end.

So, Wood Sage and Sea Salt got bought! Combined with my Blackberry it adds a woody, herbaceous depth, and the bergamot adds to the fruity top layer. We got a few samples too, as it was the launch night. And a lady has GOT to love a few free samples. Genuinely.

What do you think of Jo Malone? Do you know the brand? Are you proud to be a smelly sucker like me?? x