Potpourri That Doesn't Smell of Old Ladies and Heartbreak

My occasionally acerbic tongue is sugar-coated, compared to William L Hamilton writing A New Whiff on Potpourri for WSJ. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but when I first got to Victoria’s Secret to set up 30 test home shops what we had of a small beauty business was also under my domain. That included potpourri sachets, little lovelies that rained money and customers loved.

You can’t imagine how many sachets we sold at a markup that would endear me to every CFO in the world. My potpourri confections were truly inspiring, not like Hamilton’s vision.

“A sad, pungent smell of old ladies and heartbreak,” wrote the novelist Angela Carter. The French call it potpourri because that means “rotten pot.”

Again, I was ahead of myself.

Potpourri today is largely a failure of the imagination: rose and lavender. (“Vapourri,” or sprays, and plug-in air fresheners are also big on things like “pound cake,” popular with the diet-weakened.)

Ouch! We sold no pound cake sachets or potpourri at Victoria’s Secret. In today’s world, knowing the affect of vanilla, lavendar, licorice and cinnamon buns smells in activating blood flow in sex organs, I might be forced to change my ways.

Hamilton notes a long list of possible ingredients for our potpourri. Consider that the “top notes in Gucci’s Guilty Pour Femme are lilac and geranium. Bond No. 9’s “High Line” is based on plants in Section 1 of Manhattan’s elevated park: redleaf rose, grape hyacinth, Lady Jane tulips and bur oak. Hermès’s new fragrance, Un Jardin Sur Le Toit, is based on what grows on their rooftop garden on Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.”

I’ve never made potpourri at home, but considering the possibility, it’s a rather enchanting idea.

Read on for instructions about how to make potpourri. Anne