The Lovers

The description for The Lovers discusses how it was inspired by the morning after. But, as is so frequently the custom with these blog posts, there is more to that story.

When I first started creating fragrances, a bunch of customers would find me at an event and say they loved musk. I’ve spoken about it on Sillage and Sorcery with my cohost, Bee, but often fragrance descriptions list musk as a base note. It’s kind of insane just how often musk comes up as a description. Before I launched The Lovers, I didn’t really have any super musky fragrances. Valerie has musk in it, but it’s not incredibly strong, and Wanderlust did too, but that’s about the extent of it.

As a joke, I was like, I’m going to make the muskiest musk to ever musk, researching all about the wide variety of synthetic musks that are out there (the animal that has traditionally been used for musk was endangered, and natural musk is illegal) and how I could possibly have all of them work together. That’s how The Lovers was born.

I was thinking about something that connected to the fragrance. I dropped Ben, my Havanese dog, and the closest thing I will ever have to a child, at doggy day care. The doggy day care worker took him into her arms and then ended up getting a sniff of him in the process. “He smells so good!”

“I know! It always sounds so creepy, but Ben is one of my favorite scents in the world. I thought it was just because I’m his mom.” But that’s when I realized that Ben smells like The Lovers. He just naturally has that clean-linen, cashmere, animal-musk combination (I should note, just regularly; it has nothing to do with the puppy wash we use).

Ben came into my life when the cult was really amping up typical cult behavior that caused me to leave them. Lux, the cult leader, would often say that I was “burnt out” in order to get me to drop anything that wasn’t cult-related. When I got Ben, he was 12 weeks old and a puppy. Anyone who has had a puppy knows that it’s fucking exhausting. Before they are fully crate trained, they bark all night long. He wasn’t housebroken, and too little to be fully housebroken, so I was walking him in our complex at all hours of the day. Then he would not fall asleep unless he was on me, making me stuck on the couch for hours.

Ben, too, was something that was burning me out. I initially thought about giving up Ben, but ultimately didn’t. Now, because I run a company and I’m constantly working (I don’t know where Lux got the idea that being an entrepreneur would be less work than being an adolescent therapist), it is often Ben who gets me to stop. He gets so sad when I have to leave the house to go to an event, but he almost pees himself with excitement when I come home. Often, I go to pick up Ben at doggy day care after an event before I even unpack the car, just because I’ve missed him so much. Like a typical Havanese, his favorite time is napping next to me on the couch.

The Lovers Tarot card very rarely speaks of romantic love. It’s the combination of two things that need to be together, working in perfect harmony. And despite my perpetual state of go, it’s Ben that actually gets me to stop and smell the roses (something he loves doing in our complex every spring). He embodies everything about the Tarot card that I hold dear, and I’m so happy my fragrance smells like him.

And yes, I will pay the dog tax: