A VALENTINE'S TEA PARTY

For those readers who are local or visiting the Seattle area, Sweet Anthem Handmade Perfumes will be hosting a Valentine’s tea party on February 11, from 12-4 PM. It will feature flowers, perfume, and sweets (chocolate!) by local designers. You can do your Valentine’s shopping for yourself and/or someone else while you enjoy fine teas and gifts with purchase throughout the afternoon.

The event will provide an opportunity to meet four local designers: Nikki Sherritt, candlemaker and perfumer from Gabriel’s Aunt and Rebel & Mercury; Anne Dowell, gardener and truffle maker from Garden Bon Bons; Lydia Love, chocolatier from Chakralate; and Meredith Smith, perfumer from Sweet Anthem Handmade Perfumes.
The shop also offers a number of other perfume lines (including Olympic Orchids) and scented works by local and national independent designers.

Sweet Anthem is located at 6021-B California Ave SW in the heart of West Seattle’s Morgan Junction, across from West Seattle Wine Cellars and Meander’s Kitchen. The photo shows the entrance to the shop during the recent snowstorm.

SWEET ANTHEM PERFUME IN WEST SEATTLE

Last weekend I visited Meredith Smith in the lovely little perfume shop that she opened last October in West Seattle. Meredith is a perfumer who has been selling her own line, Sweet Anthem, on her website since 2006. Her new brick-and-mortar shop features her own complete line of perfume oils, EdPs, and solid perfumes. She currently carries other Pacific Northwest perfume lines as well, including Arcana (Portland, OR), Wiggle (Olympia, WA), Slumberhouse (Portland, OR), Rebel & Mercury (Seattle, WA), and Lulu Beauty (Seattle, WA). Within the next few weeks she will be adding selected perfumes from Ayala Moriel (Vancouver, BC) and some of my own Olympic Orchids perfumes.

Finding the shop is fairly straightforward, since it’s about 10 blocks south of the main business center of West Seattle, with plenty of street parking if you travel by car. The shop isn’t immediately obvious since the main, large lettering on the sign says “Vegan - Unique - Local”, with the name “Sweet Anthem” in small print at the top, but it is distinctive once you get used to the concept of the shop half-concealing its name.

Inside, the shop is simply and tastefully decorated and arranged, with everything displayed in an orderly and accessible way. It has a bright, comfortable feeling that’s enhanced by Meredith’s helpful manner and friendly smile. If you’re in the Seattle area, it’s a perfect place to spend some time sniffing.

With two perfume shops on California Avenue (the other one is Knows Perfume), West Seattle seems to be becoming the perfume center of the region. I’m not sure why, except that a lot of artsy people live there, so maybe that’s where the highest concentration of perfumistas is found. In any case, it’s a very good development. I'm looking forward to exploring some of the fragrances offered in Meredith's shop, including her own line.

KNOWS PERFUME: A GEM IN WEST SEATTLE

I’m back home again after a week of not posting due to being busy with conference activities, the chronic difficulty of getting on the internet, and just plain inertia. Now that I’m getting back into a normal routine, I have to decide whether to post some more of the travelogue-type things that I started writing about on the road, or switch to something directly perfume related. Perfume wins, hands down.

Before I left I had made an appointment to go show my line of fragrances to Christen Cottam, who has recently opened up a wonderful shop in West Seattle called “Knows Perfume”. West Seattle is like a self-contained little beach town, and Knows Perfume is right on the main drag, California Avenue. The entrance is simple, but attractive. The shop is easy to find, and there’s plenty of street parking, at least on a weekday. The inside looks inviting, with a couch, lots of artwork, tall stools at the counter, and plenty of floor space, with items nicely displayed on shelves and tabletops.

Christen herself is friendly, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and clearly loves what she’s doing. The lines that she sells are all ones that would be considered niche or indy, ranging from L’Artisan, Montale, and Bois 1920 to Strange Invisible Perfumes, Tallulah Jane, Smell Bent, and Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. These are the perfumes that you won’t find in the drugstore, department store, or duty-free shop. In addition to the merchandise, Christen keeps her own personal collection of perfumes at the shop for sampling, decanting, and trading. With hard-to-find perfumes to suit every taste and a level of communication and service that’s almost unheard-of these days, I predict that Knows Perfume will be a huge success.

Before opening the shop, Christen studied biology, taught high-school science, worked for a biotech company, and was a roller derby skater. Quite a life! She has obviously been interested in perfume for many years, and the shop is the culmination of that interest. She says that she considers herself more of a “curator” of perfumes than a vendor, and this attitude shows in every aspect of the shop and in her interactions with the people who come in.

We spent a long time talking about perfume and, as I was about to leave, I asked her what she would recommend to a jaded perfumista who has a closet full of samples and bottles at home (to say nothing of a fully loaded perfume organ). She first said that she would just turn them loose in the shop to sniff around, but then she started pulling some things out for me to try. I ended up coming home with generous samples of six different scents from Strange Invisible Perfumes, Costume National Homme, and Montale Attar. I just tried the SIP Musc Botanique and absolutely love it. Thank you, Christen!