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.)