No 5: Chocolate and New Beginnings

These days, I'm not quite sure how to approach Easter in the public. While it's a holiday that I believe in and celebrate, I'm aware this isn't the case for everyone so I am a bit reluctant to make a sweeping 'happy Easter!' comment. Personally, I blame twitter for this: many of the people I'm following tweeted comments such as 'enjoy your weekend, however you spend it!' or 'happy Easter, if you celebrate it!' which made me wonder about the appropriateness of broad Easter comments in the modern world.

Instead of making this post about Easter specifically (but while I'm on the subject, I hope everyone who celebrated it enjoyed it!), I've decided to focus on two universal topics: chocolate and new beginnings. Both, of course, relating to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly.

First off: chocolate. I hope that everyone reading this has recently experienced the joys of chocolate.

I grew up in a family of chocoholics and am something of a black sheep: I am not addicted to the stuff. That said, I enjoy it and believe chocolate has its place. (Come to think of it, I don't recall knowing anyone who doesn't like chocolate. By all means, prove me wrong but I'm yet to meet someone who detests it.) I can't eat much of the stuff in one sitting but sometimes I find myself in situations where the only logical thing to do is eat a piece of chocolate. (Such as when I'm writing a particularly fiendish law research paper. Or on Easter Sunday.)

Audrey Hepburn was another proponent of the importance of chocolate, saying: 'Let's face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me.' Sean Ferrer also recounts his mother eating a piece of chocolate every afternoon after her nap in his memoir. By all accounts, chocolate was one of Audrey Hepburn's little pleasures in life.

Unfortunately, I could not find a picture of Miss Hepburn eating chocolate. Instead, I chose a picture of her with Ip - the fawn she raised during the making of Green Mansions:

My reasoning is simple, really: Audrey loved Ip. Audrey also loved chocolate. Therefore, the two are related.

And my reasoning for discussing chocolate is even more simple. Chocolate is sometimes a necessary part of life. Audrey Hepburn was a proponent of this view. Therefore, you should all go and eat some chocolate.

Now that chocolate has been covered, it's time to move on to the second universal topic of this post: new beginnings. An unavoidable part of life, really: things end, things begin, things change.

Grace Kelly embarked on her own new beginning shortly after Easter 1956, when she sailed to Monaco to marry Prince Rainier. She left behind her home, her friends, her family and her career to start what was virtually an entirely new life.

The unknown can be wonderful and terrifying but I believe that to truly live your life, you need to venture out there fairly frequently. Most of my fondest memories and rewarding experiences come from such times.

Whatever you believe or don't believe, I hope this weekend nevertheless marks a new beginning for you. (And for me, come to think of it!) While I doubt any of us are about to sail off to an exotic locale to marry into royalty, I hope we have some sort of exciting new beginning. Whether it's meeting a new person, taking up a new hobby, discovering something new about ourselves, facing one of fears or whatever else.

And while we eat chocolate and have new adventures, I hope we have as much fun as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly did, raising Ip and sailing off into the sunset (respectively):

No 4: To L'Interdit or to Gin Fizz?

My obsession with Grace Kelly & Audrey Hepburn has seen me go as far as trying to smell like them. Christmas 2009, I begged for and was given Givenchy's L'Interdit: the perfume made for Audrey Hepburn at the end of the 1950s. L'Interdit means 'forbidden'. Hepburn biographies and the like say the name comes from the fact that for the first year of its life, the perfume was only available to Audrey. Pretty exclusive, then (for a year, anyway).

The only thing that could make me as excited as smelling like Audrey Hepburn is smelling like Grace Kelly. I didn't think this was possible, though, since until the end of last year I thought her signature perfume was not sold in Australia. (I had big plans to stock up on the perfume on my next trip to Paris. But considering I haven't been to Paris for six years, I expected to have to do a bit of waiting.)

Vogue Australia happily proved me wrong in one of its final issues for 2010, when it announced that Lubin's Gin Fizz is now available in select David Jones stores in Australia. So Christmas 2010, I begged for and was given Grace Kelly's signature perfume.

On the left is Givenchy's L'Interdit. On the right is Lubin's Gin Fizz. And above you can see my mad photography skills. (Not really.)

Now that I have both Ms Hepburn's and Ms Kelly's signature scents, I am faced with a daily conundrum: do I want to smell like Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly?

Of course, it depends, to a large extent, on my mood.

L'Interdit has quite a strong scent. Two sprays of that perfume and people in the next room will be able to smell you coming. Which is by no means a bad thing, it's just a thing. The perfume itself smells a bit musky and powdery (and by 'powdery', I mean in the Chanel No.5 sense, not the baby powder sense), and it has good staying power. If I want to feel elegant and loveable, and if I want people around me to be able to smell my perfume easily, L'Interdit tends to be a winner.

Gin Fizz and I are still getting to know each other, since we've only been together for almost three weeks now. Being named after a cocktail, I must admit the perfume easily made its way to my heart. A perfume that Grace Kelly loved and that is named after a cocktail?! That's a pretty darn good start. (I am yet to try a Gin Fizz, though. It should be a New Year's resolution. Although I'd have to drink the cocktail whilst wearing the perfume, otherwise it just would not feel right.)

As a perfume, Gin Fizz has a citrus-y and floral scent. It is more subtle than L'Interdit: the staying power of Gin Fizz is as good as L'Interdit's but put on two sprays, and it will only be smelt by those close to you. And I mean 'close to you' in a literal sense. People won't be able to smell you coming but if you hug someone or are sitting next to them, they'll be able to smell your cocktail of a perfume. Because of this subtlety, I feel more mysterious wearing Gin Fizz while the scent itself makes me feel feminine. It has more of a romantic feel to it so the next date I have, I will definitely be donning the Gin Fizz.

Out of the two perfumes, which I both like, I must admit I'm leaning more towards Gin Fizz overall as my preferred scent. I like the subtlety and femininity of it, and I feel it suits my skin better than L'Interdit. It's funny, isn't it, how the same perfume can smell so different when it's worn by different people. Ultimately, the perfume hunt is about finding the scent that suits your skin best.

And it is also about working the emotions a perfume creates to your advatage. I have a range of different perfumes that I wear for different purposes: one to make me feel like Audrey Hepburn, one to make me feel like Grace Kelly, one to make me feel confident, one to make me feel pretty and one to make me feel calm and happy. Perhaps it's just me but I find smell to be a pretty powerful thing, especially the smell of perfumes. It creates memories, brings back memories and evokes emotions.

While it's fun to smell like Audrey Hepburn & Grace Kelly, I think the only way to be truly Hepburn and Kelly-ish is to find what works for you and stick to that. Both Ms Hepburn and Ms Kelly found their own styles and had perfumes made just to suit them. While most of us probably won't end up having a perfume made in our honour, we can embrace our individuality and choose things that suit us rather than the masses.

And what could be more Kelly and Hepburn-ish than that?

No 3: The Art of Smart

One of the things I love most about Audrey Hepburn is her intelligence.

Watching or reading interviews, it is clear she was an articulate, informed woman. And the jobs she did, she did well. Audrey Hepburn, working for UNICEF, knew her stuff inside out: she thoroughly researched the places she visited to understand the how and whys of the heartaches she saw. Her son's memoir, An Elegant Spirit, contains one of the speeches she wrote in her UNICEF years. It's beautifully written and informative - well worth a read.

The interviews and speeches she gave for UNICEF also reveal her personality. She was never aggressive in making her point; she was gentle and hearfelt, and I think that made her pleas all the more effective. One clip, where she's talking about Somalia, you can see her fighting back tears before finally brushing one off her face. In another, she made the comment, "These are not natural disasters but man-made tragedies for which there is only one man-made solution: peace."

She came with the facts and figures imbedded in her mind after hours of research and combined this with her instinctive compassion. What a combination! Audrey Hepburn could carry - heck, she could lead - a conversation about the situation in Somalia while showing genuine concern for the suffering and I think this combination of awareness and compassion is why she reached so many people during her UNICEF years.

I'm trying to up my Hepburn-factor by being more informed and more caring. It is important to know what is happening in the world around us so we can understand not only how lucky we really are (gratitude was an art Ms Hepburn was well-trained in) but also what we can do to help. As Ms Hepburn said:

"Since the world existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing."

So let's make Audrey Hepburn smile and become compassionately informed.

It doesn't matter how we start - reading the newspaper each day, following UNICEF on twitter - as long as we start. And we keep at it.



(Audrey Hepburn could also speak several languages and randomly quote Tagore but I figure we're all multi-lingual people with an encyclopedic knowledge of literature so I didn't bother going into this.)