Before the Algorithm, There Was the Beauty Floor

Emotional theater at its best.

Today’s send is in partnership with Balmain Beauty, the fragrance line from the French fashion house Balmain. If you would like to work with The Love List, please email lauren@aire-ny.com.

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It always starts with a whisper of something half-forgotten: a citrus bite, a vanillic murmur, a shimmer of aldehyde that seems to lift you off the floor. I’m not sure when scent began to feel like a form of time travel… maybe it was the first time I passed the Estee Lauder counter and was pulled under by Youth Dew, or perhaps it goes back farther to my mother’s vanity and the heavy bottle that never moved but always seemed to evaporate.

There’s a specific kind of nostalgia that lives in the beauty counter. Not the kitschy, Instagram-filtered kind, the type that lives in muscle memory. In the way your hand naturally reaches for the glass bell jar. With the soft click of a magnetic cap. In the way the scent catches you mid-sentence, reminding you of someone you loved or someone you used to be.

For many of us, the beauty floor was our first introduction to glamour. As a child, I’d orbit the counters at Neiman Marcus with reverence, fingers sticky with lotion samples, eyes wide at the women with black blazers and perfect lips. They weren’t sales associates; they were high priestesses—gatekeepers to an altar of transformation. I learned the terms “bruising,” “sillage,” and “dry down” and to always dab rather than rub.

But the truth is, even now—with credit cards, skincare routines, and a vanity of my own—there’s still something singular about buying perfume in person.

Perfume counters are rarely quiet, but there is something holy about them that carries a reverent whiff. Women walk a little slower. Fingers trace bottle silhouettes. Salespeople speak in a low register as if guarding a secret. The Beauty Level at Bergdorf’s is a kind of sanctuary. You’re buying a product while choosing your armor.

The Balmain Beauty counter at Bergdorf Goodman.

Which is why I keep circling back to the Balmain Beauty counter lately.

Balmain Beauty’s latest offerings (not yet a year old) don’t shout. Instead, they hum. Carbone, in particular, smells complex, almost conflicted. Like the woman you notice by herself at a hotel bar. Not trying to be seen, but self-assured in a way that dares you to approach. I see her in Rouge — with its heady, floral bouquet — on a night when she’s expecting company.

Vent Vert, on the other hand, is like enticing her to get off the phone screen and touch grass. It’s a romp through nature that’s barefoot but not crunchy.

Blanc Galaxie, all citrus and myrtle, is her intimate side, maybe the side that doesn’t present immediately but unfolds like a flower if you earn it. It’s youthful but not girlish, optimistic, and pure as a white dress on Easter Sunday.

Bergdorf’s makes this kind of encounter feel cinematic. The old New York backdrop. The marble floors. The powder-soft lighting. The halo around every display. When the associate sprayed Ébène on a blotter and handed it to me, I wasn’t expecting to feel anything. But there it was, my Dad: sawdust, smoke, vaguely mineral. Like biting into a cold pear after smoking a cigarette. A contradiction that made me ache a little, the way elegiac things sometimes do.

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