July 15, 2011
To BEE by Roxana Illuminated Perfume - The Honey Collection
To BEE is Roxana's new perfume and what appears to be the culmination of many months of growing involvement in beekeeping, rescuing bee hives, developing a relationship to and learning to work as cooperatively and sensitively as possible with bees.
This perfume is made up of precious substances distilled from the labor of many many creatures, and further shaped by the hands of a poetic and romantic artist, who thinks in perfume as others do to build a beautiful house or sculpture. Each component is built with meditative careful attention and then fitted together to effect a quiet beauty that still honors the wild side of the bees and of ourselves.
This perfume is stronger and lasts longer than others from this line I have known, and I am glad of it; I think it softly breathes of the vitality of these partly feral creatures. Bees are in somewhat domesticated but we don't understand them completely. They are an entirely different flavor of the earth's life force, wilder than our own, but we do know that what they make is inherently good for us. We benefit by their honey, their wax, their royal jelly, and now we have the intimacy of their fragrance. It feels like an honor to have the opportunity to wear the liqueur of such precious substances on your own skin.
We are at the palace of the queen bee, and her rooms are infused with the nectar of thousands of flowers, distilled down to tangible form and polished into something like the reflection of a highlight on gold leaf.
Roxana's illustrated site with much more information on this and other unique botanical perfumes, is a pleasure to browse. The Honey Bee print is available on the Etsy site too; I think it's an accurate depiction of the bee's decorative fearsomeness.
A small sample of the solid perfume will go to the first person who comments they would like one. Please send your address at lraubertasatgmaildotcom in a separate email too, and I will mail it on.
An affordable sampler is available on Etsy, and the full size perfume.
For more of my posts about Roxana Illuminated Perfumes, see here, and here, and here. These is but a partial list; I suppose you can tell I am a fan (for more, try the search feature in the right column).