What I miss most during the pandemic is the ability to travel. Visiting new places or even revisiting favourite destinations seems like a distant memory. While our life has been put on hold, travelling has been replaced with short walks around the block and to the park plus the weekly drive to the supermarket for the essentials; which reminds me how I miss driving around in the counrtyside during springtime! The colours, the change of scenery and the smells that fill your senses and overwhelm you, so magical!
My car is maybe my most prized possssion; not because of how much it's worth, but of the sense of freedom it gives me and that's why it deserves only the best when it comes to fragrance. I've always been very reluctant to use any car fragrance as they all ended up smelling harsh and artificial, but when I met up with Barbara, one of the Charabanc founders back in February, I immediately changed my mind.
Charabanc is the world’s first luxury car fragrance accessory, classically engineered for the automobile. It's entirely handcrafted in Britain and it was the only British product included in the Oscars 2020 nominees' goody bag. It's design is beautiful and it comprises of a finely hand-crafted, stencilled-steel pomander encased in artisan-moulded London leather and a gorgeously scented ceramic that you can change according to mood and season.
Charabanc is an exquisitely tactile, beautifully manufactured piece of British design; it's engineered for different levels of fragrance throw within the car interior and designed to hang free from the rear-view mirror, attach to the air vent with a stainless-steel clip, or rest in the cup holder. Nowadays it scents my apartment but I can't wait for the time I can permanently place it on my rear-view mirror and take it on a long ride.
The scented ceramic pastilles convey Charabanc's fragrance journeys. Hand crafted using a wet press by a ceramics factory in Valencia, they travel to London to be hand-dipped in the fragrances created specifically by a world-famous perfume house to evoke the flora and aromatic qualities of some of the world’s most iconic drives.
The long drives Charabanc was inspired with are some of the most famous and most beautiful worldwide and have been added to my bucket list!
Across Pennine Fells, is inspired by the Lake District famous area is a green, leafy, scent filled with pine, sage, lavender, mint, fir balsam and cedarwood, Along The Plain of Castelluccio, is inspired by the colourful Italian hillsides of Umbria with notes of lavender, sage, calabrian bergamot, iris pallida, amber, cacao, vetiver, patchouli and Leather, The Golden Road to Samarqand takes un on a journey to Uzbekistan along the trail of the Silk Road with notes of pink pepper, green coffee, cedarwood, vetiver, oud smoke, amber and leather, the Journey to Tai Mo Shan pays tribute to Hong Kong's highest peak and the road that leads to it with notes of jasmine, orange blossom, incense, vetiver, sandalwood and leather and lastly, my favourite, the Monument Valley Drive, inspired by the vast landscape of Utah, filled with colours and scents with notes of raspberry, violet leaves, thyme, cypress oil, saffron, jasmine, amber, black leather and mate.
You can find Charabanc on their website, where you can read more about their fragrance journeys and the engineering details behind this unique luxury car fragrance accessory and when the world returns to normal (ish) you definitely must pay a visit to the new Lux Home Fragrance space on the 3rd Floor of Harrods where you can experience it in person!
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