A Treasury Of… Minneapolis Fashion and Interior Design Blog

I am undeniably the master of embarking on unreasonable missions, like driving all around town to half a dozen dopey little drug stores in order to find a bottle of after shave retro and Redford enough to get me and my face through the tough winter ahead.

But when I finally come across something like this $8 bottle of Master Spice, which looked to have been sitting on the store shelf since 1979, my crazy quests instantly prove to have been really, really worth it.

There’s nothing novel about even the rarest bottle of cologne – not compared to these scented Spanish towelettes.

Combining extracts of Lemon, Bergamot, Geranium and Eucalyptus, swiftly refreshing your personal space with one of these Agua de Colonia packets during your holiday travels would instantly make any dreary layover or traffic jam as spiffy and spruced-up as a Mr. Ripley thriller.

The goods: All-American.
The guests: Mostly Minnesotan.

This coming Saturday, the pop-up-style men’s market makes its way to Minneapolis thanks to the mavens behind J.W. Hulme Co., Pierrepont Hicks, Red Wing Shoes, and Fox River Socks.

The Northern Grade Ad-Hoc Men’s Market will be invading an old, antique Barn Door/Church Pew store in NorthEast Minneapolis from noon until 7. I’ll be making an unscheduled appearance at some point in the afternoon, and I think I heard there’d be hot, straight-razor shaves offered on-site too. So needless to say, it’s THE place to be seen this weekend.

I best go on now, and grow out my scruff as quickly as possible. I refuse to clash with all the domestic plaids and leathers.

Although I flirt with and photograph Byredo bottles of fragrance, I tend to end up with whatever scent COMME des GARCONS spritzes into the ether.

The essence of the line’s newest, WONDERWOOD, is richly wooded and thickly forested – yet fine and fancy; too luscious for luggy ol’ lumberjacks. It’s the smell of black-tie in a birch grove, of tuxedos in tree houses. And although I’m not afraid of an offbeat, edgy scent WONDERWOOD’s calmer and quieter than CdG’s Man 2 or Hinoki fragrances which I also favor.

For a limited time you can indulge in any of COMME des GARCONS’ scents at 25 percent off at BeautyHabit.com with a semi-secret coupon code. The code is applicable to any of BeautyHabit’s myriad of brands including Treasury favorites Valobra soaps and shaving cremes and Couto Portuguese toothpaste.

Click below to learn the not-so-secret code, and pinky promise me you won’t make fun of me for knowing it.

Promise!

(more…)

Playfully, I often turn the selection of a new scent into an ultimate death match-type competition. I’ll order a batch of sample fragrances from Luckyscent, then spray two different scents on me per day – the winner then going head to head with a new contender the next day until only one champion cologne remains.

I’d learned that with Byredo, if you sign up on their website, they’ll actually send you three scent samples in the mail free of charge. After flirting with their Fantastic Man and Bal d’Afrique fragrances last summer, the new pepper + leather based Baudelaire sounded worth a trysty test-spritz, and since they were out of one of the other scent samples I’d requested, Byredo kindly threw in a few extra vials for me.

Ladies and gentlemen, the competition begins now!

Annoying 90º plus temperatures hit Minneapolis by May this year, and there’s still a whole lot of summer yet to come. Surviving such sudden scorching all last week was made considerably easier and more exotically atmospheric by my new bar of Coco-nutty Skin Trip soap from Colorado based Mountain Ocean.

Hard and heavy and scented like a well-bronzed beach bum, the sudsy bricks are online at Hickorees.

I had intended to share my own Holiday Wish List here, just as many Treasury readers so graciously had done over the past few weeks, but December never ends up large or long enough to fit in all we want to do with it – does it?

But maybe that was for the best.

Because I’d like to take a moment to sweetly (re)state that one of the original intentions of this Treasury was to shift the energy of a materialism-based blog away from what was desired and toward what was treasured. Away from the emptiness of wanting things toward the energy of enjoying things.

It’s not easy to do this. Not easy, especially, for me to do this.

And, arguably, it’s not money that makes the world go round, it’s wanting things that makes the world go round. I like sharing what I want, I like just as much hearing what you want and wanting things leads to creativity and hard work and pleasure and a myriad of non-shallow, non-evil pleasures.

But in this season of riches, in our privileged world in which we troll down glowing screens on thousand dollar machines to cherry-pick from a forest of fashiony blogs all the pretty things we swear we need, I just wanted to remember part of the original purpose behind my Treasury. And to non-naggingly remind myself and my far-off friends to appreciate and value and treasure all we each have – now, already, and inherently. Because there are many in this world who are not so lucky to live in the luxury that we cherry-pickers do.

Okay. So, instead of my Holiday Wish List, over the coming days I’ll post my Gifted List and share what, now that Christmas 2009 has passed, the things I am now lucky enough to actually have! I promise to slowly savor each and every item on this list before I start salivating over anything newer and seemingly shinier.

So here goes.

1. Gravel – A Man’s Cologne

Somewhere down the rabbit hole of blogs this fall, I learned about this singular scent. Created in Germany in 1957 and offered at only one retail location in each city in which it’s available, each bottle is anchored with a seabed of pebbles inside which dissolve slowly over the years, lending the cologne a salty, silty, sailor-like hit.

A scent’s actual…um, scent sometimes has little to do with why I step under its splashy haze. Often times simply its name, and thus the time and era it transports me to is the crux of its intoxication. Other times, like a shimmery sculpture, its the fragrance’s bottle that seduces – demanding to displayed as a dresser-top objet d’art.

With Gravel cologne, its these attractions plus its “sweat ‘n cocktails at a cliffside campfire” scent that set me into a spritzy-fit. Everything about it is just so awesomely outré.

I’d like to take a moment and applaud the makers of American, low-cost health and beauty products because they’re one of the few sectors remaining that let the packaging of their products get so old and outdated that they’re actually awesome and attractive looking again! Since I’m not much of a pill-popper, it’s my primary reason to head to the drug store.

So far things have been going smooth, but I know in a week or two the weather’s gonna get rude and rough, and two days later so is my skin. This winter I’m reverting back to good old school cocoa butter. I aimed to do so last December but I could no longer find the bright, retro yellow line of Cococare products locally, and I just don’t want to slather chocolate scratch-n-sniff sticker scented lotion on my face unless it’s coming out of a tub or tube destined for a Vincent Gallo movie scene.

(Wow, get this: I just looked it up and Cococare has actually been manufactured in Dover, New Jersey the past 40 years. Vincent Gallo indeed!)

This year I hopped online to locate Cococare and Walgreens.com let me know that a few select stores in my area actually still carry the line. So cocoa-ed, glowing December skin, here I come.

Much of what winds up in my medicine cabinet earns its spot on the shelf due either to its pretty packaging, or being paraben-free, or being decidedly cheap or, alternately, indulgently spendy.

My Proraso shaving cream is none of the above, per se but I wouldn’t dare shave without it. (And haven’t, for the past five years.)

When it comes to other toiletries, toothpastes and hair gunk, bar soaps or spray cologne, staying Brand Loyal for too long inevitably becomes boring – the once invigorating flavors or scents that were once so attractive fade over time into numbing nothingness.

But shaving is serious, manly business!

(Even) I can’t care if my shaving cream is a bargain, or Boysenberry Jojoba-scented, or crammed in a cool Helvetica-decorated can if my neck’s gonna end up bumped and bloodied after use.

The thick, oily paste of Proraso tingles with eucalyptus and smooths the face into a slick, slippery surface that renders the razor a tool rather than a weapon. It’s men’s grooming magic and I’m a customer for life.

Originally I found it at Target for 5 bucks a box, now I usually track it down at Bath & Body Works for twice as much in a C.O. Bigelow-branded version. Wherever you can find it, you’ll be doing your face a favor.

On white and off-white. Alright?

There’s a year-old shop in town called Martin Patrick 3 that stocks men’s personal and home accessories with a great-grandfatherly twist. It’s where the walking cane I requested for Christmas came from.

On a recent visit to the shop I noticed a bowl of lovely little coin pouches (not pictured) in oblong pucks of brown tanned leather. They were hard though, like a Vuitton travel case, and their sturdy flying-saucer shape and structure was really intriguing.

I stopped back a month later to pick one up and they were still lovely, but somehow, less so. So I went for a less revolutionary business-card case in navy blue instead. (But am gonna collect coins not cards in it nonetheless.)

The slimmer profile and blue color would better fit and contrast inside and within my tan briefcase, and it struck me overall as a bit more Billykirk-y.

As seen in the first photo, I also picked up two more bars of imported Italian soaps. They’re great for scenting my t-shirt shelves before I break open the boxes for actual use in the bathtub.

Question – do I write too constantly about cologne?

To be fair, I wear it every day and I do feel it helps transport me to other places and times. Sometimes I don’t even have to spray it on, I can just glance at the bottle on my bathroom shelf and pretend I’m someone richer, slicker, or grittier.

In the shadows of an image on All Plaidout I came across a bottle of Nostalgia by Santa Maria Novella. I’ve been wearing the house’s Colona Russa (Russian Cologne) the past few summers since something in its mix literally chills and tickles my skin with every spritz. It’s like running through a shivery sprinkler before having to get dressed on hot humid mornings.

Nostalgia sounds like the ideal, atypical scent to sport in the cooler months when Colona Russa proves icily abusive to wear.

“Nostalgia is the scent of a vintage racing car. It brings to mind the small of benzene, tires and leather for a truly unique and individual eau de cologne,” the LAFCONY website states.

Something that tough and turbine sounds perfect come fall.