Author: Kate Sloan

Behind the Seams: Fun, Flirty, & Flu-y

Kate Sloan

May 4th, 2018. After a long battle with a bad flu, I was soooo ready to feel pretty again. So I asked my Sir to choose my outfit for a jaunt to the Hart House Theatre to see The Artist & The Pervert, a new documentary about kink educator Mollena Williams and her husband/Master, world-famous composer Georg Friedrich Haas. I wanted to feel kinky and sophisticated, and this outfit totally fit the bill.

I have a long and storied history with this dress. It’s the American Apparel figure skater dress, which I already own in a few different colorways. Years ago, before American Apparel closed, I tried on this dress but ultimately opted not to buy it, because the price tag was a little steep for the broke-ass university student I was at that time. But then I lived in regret, particularly once AA went bankrupt, and tried to buy one on eBay. The seller ghosted me, however, and I had to file for a refund through Paypal. Finally, years later, I found the dress in my size in another eBay shop, and now it is mine. Hallelujah.

What I’m wearing:
• Hair in braids, because Sir said so
• Maybelline Matte Ink liquid lipstick in “Pioneer”
• Black American Apparel figure skater dress – secondhand on eBay
• Silver L’Amour-Propre heart lock engraved with “Daddy’s,” worn on a repurposed chain (Sir has me wear this sometimes as basically a fancier alternative to my collar)
• Black tights
• Black leather Frye harness boots
• (Not pictured) Black leather jacket (this day brought one of the blusteriest windstorms Toronto has seen in a long time!)

May 6th, 2018. Still feverish and flu-y, I nonetheless trekked out into the world to attend my aunt’s birthday party uptown. It was a small, cozy get-together with crackers and cheese and fondue and Sondheim nerdery and good storytelling.

At one point, an older family member asked me if I was wearing Toronto Maple Leafs socks, and I narrowly avoided explaining that no, actually they were from a BDSM-themed coffee shop in Minneapolis. (This side of the family is relatively kink-friendly – there are even openly queer and kinky people among their ranks – but it was still a family event! I still, for example, opted not to wear my collar, even though it would have matched.)

P.S. This skirt is pretty close to perfect, and I’m sure I’ll be wearing it a lot this spring and summer. The fabric is soft and flowy, the cut is flattering and simple, and it even has POCKETS! Shout-out to the rare piece of women’s clothing that is both cute and functional.

What I’m wearing:
• Hair in little pigtail-buns
• Royal blue T-shirt – American Apparel
• Black high-waisted A-line skirt – ASOS
• Blue and white striped knee-high athletic socks – Leather & Latte in Minneapolis (my favorite memory from this place is that someone walked in and asked the barista at the counter, “Is the Mistress in?” – unfortunately she wasn’t, but wow, what a question)
• Black leather Frye harness boots
• Coach Mercer satchel in “Cloud”

May 8th, 2018. I often wear this Dildorks shirt on days when I have to edit a podcast episode. It’s super uncool, like wearing a band T-shirt to see that band play – or, indeed, like emblazoning your chest with an illustration of your own face – but whatever, it makes me happy. And I don’t think most people even realize it’s me when they see it.

I wore this out to a favorite local coffee shop to edit the podcast, work on some blog posts, and do some thoughtful navel-gazing in my journal. What else is new, right?

What I’m wearing:
• Dildorks logo baseball-style shirt – Zazzle (art by Amy, who is the best)
• Black and white polka-dotted skater skirt – ASOS
• Striped socks – the Gap
• Black leather Frye harness boots
• Revlon Ultra HD matte lip color in “Obsession” (such a pretty, springy pink!)

What recent outfits of yours have made your heart sing?

Review: Cowgirl

Kate Sloan

What kind of person would spend $2,000 on a sex toy?

I kept wondering this whenever I would read about the new rideable vibrator from Alicia Sinclair (of b-Vibe and Le Wand fame), the Cowgirl. I just couldn’t figure out what would motivate someone to drop that much money on a sex toy. A friend of mine once spent $956 on a Venus for Men, but that’s a basically automated, hands-free blowjob-in-a-box. I would consider buying a toy that pricey if it would essentially give me effortless orgasms, too, if I could afford it.

But there is nothing effortless about the Cowgirl.

Based loosely on the infamous Sybian, the Cowgirl is a vibrator roughly the size of an ottoman. It’s heavy as fuck – 28 pounds out of the box – so I had to get my mom and brother to help me transport it from my parents’ house (where I had it shipped) to my apartment across town. Fortunately for me, my family is chill as hell.

The Cowgirl is marketed as essentially a slicker, more luxurious update to the Sybian. Alicia Sinclair has a habit of doing this: she previously called her Le Wand “a refined classic wand massager with upgraded features and gorgeous design,” despite it being a buzzier, louder, reskinned Magic Wand Rechargeable. I will admit, however, that the Cowgirl does indeed have some advantages over the Sybian. It’s covered in soft, luxe leather, making it more comfortable and more aesthetically pleasing than its predecessor. It has handles, making it more portable than the Sybian (well, as portable as a 28-pound, 16.7” by 13.4” by 10.9” sex toy is ever gonna be, anyway). It has fewer attachment options available – just two, an external one and an insertable one, versus the 17+ different attachments Sybian currently offers – but the all-black attachments are more aesthetically harmonious than the Sybian’s, and are also made of 100% silicone, a claim which only a few Sybian attachments can make.

I’ve only tried a Sybian once – three years ago, at my friend Epiphora‘s house, while eating pizza and watching Fifty Shades of Grey with a bunch of sex bloggers – so I can’t give you an in-depth comparison of the two, sensation-wise. However, I seem to remember the Sybian being buzzier (i.e. possessing higher-pitched vibrations) than the Cowgirl. Both are embarrassingly loud, especially at the higher speeds. Both create what I can only describe as weird intestinal feelings as I get into the higher settings – not exactly a sexy sensation for me.

The Cowgirl is a few inches bigger than the Sybian in all dimensions, which would, I suppose, make it more comfortable to sit on for certain kinds of bodies. However, for mine, it’s definitely less comfortable. I have a hip condition which makes it painful for me to spread my legs wide, especially if I’m putting weight on my knees at the same time. My knees themselves also have some mobility and chronic pain issues; keeping them bent for long periods can be agonizing. So, as you might imagine, rideable vibrators aren’t exactly my favorite thing. The Cowgirl requires my legs to splay wider than the Sybian does, so it gets painful more quickly for me. There’s been many a Cowgirl testing session when I’ve climbed off the toy only to collapse in pain, needing to stretch out my hips and knees for long minutes before I’d feel normal again. What could be a sexy foreplay toy or even the “main event” for some people is so physically debilitating to me that I usually can’t do much of anything after using it.

Theoretically, if you, too, have trouble with the straddling position, you could lie on your back and tilt the toy toward you, like the Sybian FAQ recommends doing. But the Cowgirl is bigger and heavier than the Sybian so this is trickier to manage.

In addition to its corded remote control (which is blessedly easy to use and plays nicely into my vibrator-as-hysteria-treatment fantasies with its vaguely clinical aesthetic), the Cowgirl can also be controlled either locally via the company’s own Bluetooth app, or long-distance via a different app. (Consolidating these two would’ve been way better…) The app setup is so complicated and labor-intensive, however, that even my app-developer boyfriend was like, “Nah, fuck this.” My kingdom for a We-Vibe-esque plug-and-play ease of use.

Besides its bulkiness, heaviness, unreasonable noise level, unreasonable price, and overcomplicated setup, my other main grievance with the Cowgirl is its name. It’s 2018; there is no longer any excuse for making a toy for people with vulvas and telling consumers (even implicitly) that it’s only for women. When companies do this, they alienate potential customers who have vulvas but are not women, they alienate women who don’t have vulvas, and they proudly show off how behind-the-times they are in their understanding of gender. I brought this up with a PR rep for the toy and she told me, “I’ve definitely been thinking about gendered branding… and I’m sure it’s a conversation we’re going to continue to have here,” which is nice, I guess, but feels pretty empty. We shouldn’t need to point these things out to companies at this point; they should know these things by now.

Is there anything I like about the Cowgirl? I guess. It’s pretty to look at (depending on your tastes), relatively easy to use once you’ve got it set up, and has vibrations strong and rumbly enough that they can probably get you off, if you can comfortably maintain the position the toy demands of you. I might be able to recommend it if it was less shockingly loud, or more comfortable to use, or less prohibitively expensive, but alas, it isn’t. I asked my boyfriend – with whom I’ve tested this toy a few times – what he likes about the Cowgirl, if anything, and he replied, “I like that it’s black, and I like dials.” Not exactly a rave.

If you have $2,000 to drop on a sex toy (?!) and want one that’s sure to impress and confuse, maybe you need a Cowgirl. But maybe, instead, you just need a Magic Wand Rechargeable, a Stronic Eins, and an uncomfortable chair to sit on. The net effect would be about the same.

 

Thanks to SheVibe for letting me try the Cowgirl!

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Kate Sloan

The most romantic story I’ve ever heard is told to me in my aunt’s kitchen during a family party.

It’s shortly before the total solar eclipse of summer 2017. An older woman I hardly know – a distant relative by marriage – is sipping white wine on a barstool next to me, and we strike up a casual conversation. “My husband and I are headed down to Illinois to see the solar eclipse,” she announces breezily. “We’ve been planning this trip for almost 30 years!”

I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”

I watch her eyes wander fondly to the nerdy, affable-looking guy currently fussing with a roast chicken he’s about to slide into the oven. “When I first met him, in the ’80s, a total solar eclipse had just happened, and he’s a big eclipse nerd, so he was there,” she tells me in a low, conspiratorial voice. “He said, ‘Hey, you should come with me to Illinois for the total solar eclipse in 2017. It’s going to be beautiful.'” She takes another sip of her wine. Her husband is catching none of this; he’s too busy making dinner. “We’d only been dating a few weeks,” she adds with a smile, “and now it’s decades later and we’re going!”

I’m floored. Shortly into a new relationship myself, I have no idea what would make someone so sure of a relationship so quickly that they would start making plans that far in the future. People breeze in and out of my life so easily, so suddenly; I can barely imagine believing a partner will still be around in a few weeks, let alone a few decades.

“Did that freak you out?” I ask, unable to contain myself. “That he asked you that, so soon into your relationship?”

She considers the question, and shrugs. “No, not really. I guess I just knew.”

Both of our eyes slide back over to her husband, and I can feel us wondering how he knew. How anyone knows a relationship is meant to last. It’s an impossible, unanswerable question, and one I desperately want an answer for.

Some heartbreaks are big, and some are small. That summer goes on to contain both for me. The first in the series comes when my boyfriend sleeps with someone else when we’ve only been dating for an intense, heady two weeks – without asking me, notifying me in advance, or seeming in any way to consider my feelings in this decision. I feel like the rug’s been ripped out from under me, but because we’ve agreed to be non-monogamous, I feel I have no right to express displeasure with him, even as my heart crumples in on itself.

But he’s not completely oblivious. Apparently sensing my misery, he texts me, “I was having this lovely daydream yesterday, of us together in a few years. You were more established as a writer, and you’d always bring me as your +1 to all the fancy events.”

This text comes in while I’m en route to a coffee shop, and I burst into tears on the street.

His near-immediate gravitation toward someone else, so soon after meeting me, has me feeling like he doesn’t want me anymore, or like our relationship is doomed. So to receive this explicit acknowledgment that he not only wants me now but thinks he’ll still want me in a few years is groundbreaking: a balm for my wounded heart. It hasn’t occurred to me yet to wonder if I still want to be with him in a few years, because women are socialized to desperately cling to any halfway-decent man who wants us, our own desire and comfort be damned.

“It made me feel really happy and safe to know that you think we’ll still be together years from now,” I tell him later. “That’s why I cried when I got that text.”

“I know,” he replies. “That’s why I sent it.”

But his daydream turns out to be an empty promise. When he breaks up with me a few months later, he offers dully by way of explanation, “The long-term potential I thought I saw isn’t actually there.” I gather my things and walk out his door with hot tears stinging my eyes, faced with the task of rewriting all those futures I thought he’d be a part of.

“My heart is fucking broken,” I write in my journal. “This makes me feel like I can never trust anyone again. Like even people who insist they love me and will take care of me, and who prove it for a while, cannot be trusted to stick around.”

My dating life, for a while, is haunted by the spectre of this man. Far from “seeing what happens” and “going with the flow,” I can’t maintain an interest in any person in the present because their presence in my future is not assured. I know, logically, that any relationship can end at any time for any reason, but still I long for the safety of a solid long-term commitment. Without that, I feel sad, adrift, and alone.

The shadow of that perceived betrayal weighs heavily on my next relationship, to my chagrin. “It’s like the two of you are in dialogue with each other,” I tell my new boyfriend thoughtfully over the phone, after relaying to him – in January – the details of my August breakup. I should be over it by now. I know that; I do. But that profound feeling of safe-and-then-suddenly-not-safe is still haunting my psychology, making me see danger where there is none.

See, this new relationship is, by all indications, safe as houses. Five days after my first date with this mysterious Twitter crush from New York, I’m telling him about the Hippo Campus concert I’ll be attending on my next trip to his city, and he asks, “Is someone going with you to that?”

“Nah, just me.” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask anyone. I don’t know any other Hippo Campus fans in real life, and certainly would never expect a friend to trek to another country just to see my favorite band play. “Do you want a date?” he asks, so casual, like this question isn’t a Big Fucking Deal.

“Haven’t you not even heard any of their music?” I ask, and he answers coolly, “I’ve got time.” And then he hops onto the Brooklyn Steel website and orders his ticket.

I can’t articulate how much this gesture means to me, and I worry that even if I could, it would scare him off. Because what he’s telling me with this simple $20 ticket purchase is: I like you enough to stay in your life for two months, at least. We’ve only spent a couple hours together so far, over coffee and kisses, and he’s already sold enough on me to bet we’ll want to dance together to a quartet of indie-pop boys two whole months from now. It’s funny how I’ll happily make plans with friends months in advance, but a new potential romantic partner tries to flip a couple calendar pages and I panic. There’s no way he’ll still be interested in me by then, I think, pathetically – but he’s already bought the ticket, so what can I do?

As those two months slide by, more and more hints emerge that maybe this boy plans to stick around. I tease him, “You’ve gotta charm my best friend if you ever meet them,” and he amends, “Hopefully when.” I tell him I know what color I’d use for him in my spreadsheet if we had sex, and he corrects me, “When, not if.” One night during a tearful phone call about Serious Emotional Stuff, I wipe my leaky eyes and say, “I’m sorry; I’m just not used to feeling this emotionally safe with someone,” and he answers fiercely, “Well, you can get used to it, because I’m not going anywhere.” I melt. I cry harder. I melt some more.

When the night of the concert comes, it’s even more special than I imagined it being when he first bought the ticket – because I’m not just going to a show with some guy I went on a date with once; I’m going to a show with someone I’ve been talking to on the phone almost every night, and slowly negotiating a delicious D/s dynamic with, and – whoops – falling in love with. He kisses me in the line outside the venue, holding my gaze steadily whenever our lips aren’t touching, and I imagine showing this tableau to me-from-two-months-ago. She’d be shocked he showed up at all, let alone showed up with this ferocious affection in his eyes.

Later that night, at a rooftop bar overlooking Brooklyn, he tells me he loves me for the first time. I say it back, and it’s devastatingly true. It’s so much not what I was expecting, and yet it’s exactly what I want.

He’s shown me even more, in the months since then, just how enduring he thinks our love will be. He’s bought plane tickets to Toronto a month in advance, and then showed up at my doorstep on the appointed day, handsome and smiling. He’s assigned me protocols that reach into the future, with more certainty than I can muster – enough certainty for the both of us. He’s bought tickets to conferences I’m attending, and exclaimed excitedly about all the things we’ll do there. Most of all, he’s told me, many nights, “I want to love you for a long time.” And though it’s impossible to guarantee such a thing, I feel more and more safe in his love every time he re-asserts this sentiment. We’re building something together, and I can see from his actions – not just his words – that he is serious about building it strong, building it well, building it to last.

When I used to complain to my therapist that no relationship felt safe to me because there was no certain promise of a future together, she’d ask, “But why do you need that to feel safe? Can’t you just enjoy the way things are right now, without worrying about what comes next?”

I can’t. Maybe it’s my anxiety, or my past heartbreaks, or just my temperament, but I can’t be fully satisfied with a futureless present, try as I might.

But fortunately, in this relationship, both the present and the future look pretty bright.

Behind the Seams: Slutty Seductress + Glamorous Grampa

Kate Sloan

March 24th, 2018. I wore this to a party my friend Suz threw to celebrate the overhaul and relaunch of her blog. The event description said, “Kinky, queer, fetish wear, glitter, and extra outfits are highly encouraged!” so I decided to get real slutty.

I bought this dress at Forever 21 in early 2016 and couldn’t believe such a mainstream store was selling such an overtly fetishistic item. However, then Bex pointed out that I may have been wearing it backwards… and, as it turned out, they were right. The corsetry is supposed to go up the back, instead of being essentially a cleavage window. But fuck that: I do what I want!

The party was a good time: we danced to ’90s pop, drank cocktails, talked about sex research, watched porn being projected on a giant screen, ate cupcakes with penises and vulvas on them, and debated the merits of various sex toys. Suz really knows how to throw a shindig!

What I’m wearing:
• Hair in braided high pigtails (the Baby Spice vibez are TOO good; I need to do this more often)
• Tight black lace-up dress – Forever 21
• Skin-tone pantyhose – probably Shoppers Drugmart (bought to wear to a wedding last year)
• Black leather Frye engineer boots
• Silver “Daddy’s” heart-shaped padlock – a gift from my love, custom-made by L’Amour-Propre, worn on a chain from a silver key necklace I got on Canal Street in 2006

April 15th, 2018. When I put this on, I looked at myself in the mirror and decided I looked like a glamorous grampa. It’s quite an aesthetic!

This is, IMO, the ideal outfit for schlepping through a foot of snow to a local café on a lazy Sunday afternoon, sipping a latte, and reading a trippy award-winning novel for a few hours, which is exactly what I did. I also journaled about the top-10 most memorable sexual experiences of my life thus far, because what else would a sex writer do on her day off?

What I’m wearing:
• Maybelline SuperStay Matte Ink liquid lipstick in “Pioneer” (it stayed on admirably and didn’t even mark the mug I drank from – impressive!)
• White J. Crew men’s T-shirt – a gift from my boyfriend; he wore it under an impeccable navy suit on our second date and, the next morning, told me I could keep it, a gesture I predictably reacted to by clutching it against my nose and bursting into tears
• Berry-pink merino wool V-neck cardigan – the Gap
• Black leggings – the Gap
• Black leather Frye engineer boots
• Coach Mercer satchel in a color called “Cloud” – one of the few fancy treats I bought when I briefly had a sugar daddy last year
• Montale “Aoud Lime” perfume (obsessed – it’s like a little kick of springtime, which, on this absurdly wintry mid-April day, felt necessary)

April 24th, 2018. I wore this to perform in the Bed Post variety show at the Super Wonder Gallery. I’ve been on the bill at Bed Post a couple times before and it’s always a hoot: the host, Erin Pim, is a whip-smart driven fox, and she always picks such funny, talented, magnetic people for her show’s lineup. It was an honor to be invited back!

I played 3 sexy and/or kinky songs of mine: “Compliance,” “Casual,” and “A Nerd Like You.” Then I settled in with a whiskey on the rocks to watch the other acts, including adorable comedian Emily Bilton and burlesque bombshell Zyra Lee Vanity. Such a fun evening!

What I’m wearing:
• A navy blue smoky eye and red lipstick
• Hair in braided pigtails because Sir said so
• Blue L’Amour-Propre collar, also because Sir said so
• “It’s Magic” T-shirt – Pen and Kink
• Navy high-waisted skirt – Old Navy
• Navy tights – Hue
• Black leather Frye harness boots
• (Not pictured) Leather jacket for that rock-star edge

A Bespoke Signature Scent From My Love

Kate Sloan
Photo via Stephen Dirkes

I often joke-without-joking that, at 26, I’m not an adult yet and I don’t know when I will be. True, I’ve reached certain milestones I associate with adulthood – living away from home, having a stable job, making to-do lists with boring things on them like “submit tax forms” and “take out the recycling” – but, in many ways, I still think of myself as a child. For all the Adult Benchmarks I’ve crossed off my list, there are many more I have not – like owning a set of glassware, getting a driver’s license, and, until recently, having a signature scent.

That last one happened quite recently, in fact. You see, for my birthday, my boyfriend commissioned perfumer Stephen Dirkes of Euphorium Brooklyn to make me my own custom fragrance. (Cue swoony girlish screaming.)

My love was mysterious about it throughout the entire process. “I met with a guy named Stephen today about your birthday gift,” he told me a few weeks before I was to turn 26. “He says the timeline is tight, but he thinks we can make it work.”

The following week, he updated me: “Today I did a bunch of research and sent Stephen a lot of what I learned. Hopefully it’ll be useful.” I was mystified. What did he have up his sleeve?!

Finally, a few days before my birthday, my beau arrived in Toronto for a weekend visit. Not long after getting to my apartment and setting down his bags, he told me, “I wanna give you your present now, because I can’t wait any longer.”

At his behest, I put on a blindfold while he rooted through his suitcase for the present, so I wouldn’t see anything until he wanted me to. Then he had me hold my upturned wrists out in front of me, and I felt him spray them with a cold liquid. An unfamiliar scent hit my nostrils, floral and dark and complicated. And then my love took off my blindfold and handed me a bottle of Aimanté.

I practically started hyperventilating as he explained how he had turned an idea into a perfume. He knew someone who had commissioned Stephen Dirkes to make a custom scent, and, knowing about my fragrance proclivities, thought I might like one of my own. (Um, very yes.) So he set up a meeting with Stephen and started collecting information about my scent preferences however he could: searching through old tweets and blog posts, looking up my favorite perfumes to determine which notes they had in common, and pondering how to distill his love for me into a scent.

Scents have been a recurring motif in our relationship, as I’m sure they are in many. Shortly after our first date, I told him the smell of him was still flitting through my memory, and he texted me a link to the cologne he’d been wearing. Since then, he’s decided which perfume I should wear when we’re out together, left me shirts of his to inhale deeply in his absence, sent me flowers to excite my senses during depressed spells, and even kept the occasional pair of my panties to sniff when he misses me. Giving me a unique perfume seemed like a natural evolution of the olfactory flirtation we’d already been engaged in for quite some time.

“The juice” went through a few iterations; my partner brought some rough drafts on sampling cards for me to sniff. The final fragrance is aggressively feminine and sexy, yet quirky – like me. It’s a blend of blood orange, red geranium, balsam, amber, cocoa, patchouli, and vetiver, which reads to me like a peculiar mishmash of notes but which flows together undeniably well when you actually sniff it.

The name, Aimanté, is a French word meaning either “loving” or “magnetic,” depending on context. It’s a nod to how the two of us have often described our attraction as inevitable, ineffable, magnetic. On our second date, yearning to kiss him but not yet allowed, I told him, “I feel like a magnet,” and he said, “I do too.”

The scent itself intrigued me from the first, and has grown on me with every wear. When my darling debuted it on my wrists that day, it struck me as outsized: too loud for li’l old me, bolder and brasher and more beautiful than I have ever felt. But then I thought of something Helena Fitzgerald once wrote in the Dry Down: “Giving someone perfume as a gift is a chance to show them who they are to you,” she theorized, “and receiving perfume as a gift is the opportunity to wear that self as a costume, for brief periods of time to live as the person someone else understands you to be.”

With that in mind, the perfume felt more right to me. It’s like when someone who loves you takes a photo of you and captures a beauty you’ve never been able to see in yourself. I began to feel stirrings of the zaftig confidence evoked by the fragrance, which I know my partner sees in me but which I often can’t see in myself. What an unspeakably powerful gift to give someone.

Like most perfumes, Aimanté goes through an evolution as you wear it. The first few minutes are heady and floral, a burst of ridiculous femininity, like a wealthy woman posing for a portrait in her powder room, clutching a bouquet of geraniums. On me, it fades down gradually, hour by hour, into something sweeter and simpler. The sinful creaminess of the cocoa and vetiver sing at its core, so I can be a brassy broad by day and an elegant femme by night. The truth of me is somewhere between those two extremes – I’m neither totally bold nor totally docile – so I like that my new perfume oscillates between these two types of woman, too.

The idea of having a “signature scent” has long appealed to me, ever since I was rocking Kate by Kate Moss daily in the 10th grade and maybe even before that. But I rarely found a fragrance that resonated enough to make it my go-to. Certain faves have emerged over the years – Varvatos, Tobacco Vanille, Noel au Balcon, and Aoud Lime, to name just a few – but seldom has one endured as the scent I wanted to represent me in others’ minds and memories. None of them felt entirely like “me.” I suppose it took a partner who knows me inside and out to create a scent that really feels, wholly and harmoniously, like the essence of me.

I can’t think of another gift I’ve received that made me feel as seen, as understood, or as loved as this one. And I’m reminded of that deep, fierce love each time I lift my wrist to my nose.