Six centuries ago, Saint Ignatius of Loyola offered these words of advice: “It is not enough to cultivate vegetables with care. You have the duty to arrange them according to their colors and to frame them with flowers, so they appear like a well-laid table.” Heeding this advice, Europeans have long excelled at creating grand kitchen gardens (or potagers, as the French call them) that combine vegetables and ornamental plants in stunning designs.

Today, the concept seems more timely than ever, especially in the West, where ever-smaller yards give gardeners more incentive to make the vegetable patch an aesthetically pleasing part of the landscape. On these pages, we show beautiful, productive vegetable gardens, each representing different approaches to design. Choose the style that suits your taste, and have fun experimenting. You’ll be rewarded with a well-laid table–in the garden and in the kitchen.

Focal points in a formal setting

“Vegetable gardening should be elevated to the level of a formal garden, where the beauty of the plants can be shown off to maximum potential,” says designer Freeland Tanner, who gardens with his wife, Sabrina, in Napa, California. Inspired by the plants’ delightful colors, textures, and forms, the Tanners created a inviting garden room in which to show them off.

A formal allee of metal arbors draws visitors into the garden along a gravel path and culminates at a circular herb bed accented with a wooden obelisk.

Throughout the rest of the garden, raised beds with low stone columns at the corners form living tapestries of plants in complementary colors. “I stage each bed like a flower arrangement,” Freeland explains. He starts with a focal point in the center, then builds a composition around it.

Large half-barrels, for instance, anchor most beds. In each barrel, the Tanners place an obelisk (planted with beans or peas, depending on the season) or a handsome blend of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. In other beds, variegated corn, Agastache ‘Tutti Frutti’ (shown above), or other tall plants serve as focal points. Below these, low-growing herbs and vegetables form patterns (as in a potager) or a more random mix of compatible colors and shapes.

Each bed is edged with overlapping hoops formed from small cuttings of apple, elderberry and pear trees. The hoops are then underplanted with sweet alyssum, parsley, or violas.

The Tanners do mix in a few choice nonedible perennial flowers with their crops. “This way, we’ll always have vegetables for dinner and flowers for the table,” says Freeland.

Fences frame the garden

Vi Kono of Redmond, Washington, started by framing a space with fences, then composing a garden within it. “I can see the vegetable plot from my kitchen,” she explains. “The fence gives structure to the garden and gives me something to look at during the time of year when there’s the least to see.”

The rustic fence is composed mostly of bitter cherry saplings joined with wood screws. Three varieties of espaliered apples form a living fence along the south side. Fence-top birdhouses, as well as an arbor and gates made of unpeeled logs and twigs, convey the feeling that Hobbits inhabit the garden.

Inside the fence, assorted vegetables–carrots and garlic, Swiss chard and lettuce, squash and tomatoes–share informal, curved beds with dahlias, delphiniums, lavatera, perennial linaria, and a few annuals like cosmos and marigolds. Edible-pod ‘Sugar Snap’ peas and pole beans clamber up twiggy trellises, while a hop vine and porcelain berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) grow up opposite sides of an arbor that runs along one side of the garden.

At planting time, every vegetable and flower seedling gets a sprinkling of controlled-release fertilizer. To maintain soil fertility, Kono digs in vast quantities of compost each year, supplemented with cow manure every third year.

Giving peas a rung up

Julie Heinsheimer of Palos Verdes, California, has a passion for old, weathered garden implements. So when she found this vintage ladder in a trash heap, she rescued it and put it to use as a support for vining vegetables. Peas climb it in spring (cucumbers take their place in summer). Wire wrapped around the ladder gives the vine tendrils plenty of places to twine around. Near the ladder, the rosy pink plumes of Jupiter’s beard (Centranthus ruber) attract beneficial insects, including butterflies.

RELATED ARTICLE: Design tips

* Create focal points. Place a large container, an obelisk, a trellis, or a sculptural object in the center of the bed.

* Arrange the bed like a container. Place taller plants in the center and surround them with shorter plants.

* Plant in patterns. Arrange low-growing plants with interesting forms, colors, and textures (cabbages, herbs like basil) in circles or other patterns.

* Echo colors. Start with a colored vegetable (purple eggplant, for example), then echo the hue with similarly colored vegetables, flowers, or foliage.

* Grow vegetables vertically. Trailing types of cucumbers, melons, and squash are space hogs: Train them on an arbor or trellis. Pole beans, peas, and indeterminate tomatoes also need to be trained on some sort of structure.

Sales have been growing rapidly for Beauty Products International (BPI) of Malibu, Calif., a two-man export trading company founded 19 months ago.

After being involved in several business ventures together, partners James K. Yoder and Kent Post believed that the time was fight to form a company focused completely on international sales and marketing. Without any previous export experience, Yoder and Post attended an export seminar organized by the Los Angeles District Office of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration.We learned about the tools we needed to operate in foreign markets as well as the multitude of services and programs offered by the Department of Commerce,” Yoder said. Working closely with district office trade specialist Carlos Valderama, BPI employed such services, as Commercial News U.S.A., the monthly magazine for overseas agents that promotes the products and services of U.S. firms, the Agent Distributor Service (ADS) and the World Traders Data Report (WTDR) credit services.

“BPI can trace half of its overseas customers back to U.S. Commerce Department services,” Yoder claimed.

In May, 1987, at the suggestion of Valderama, BPI participated in the Rep/Com Trade Show in Mexico City, just one of the many trade shows organized by the Commerce Department to help U.S. companies locate sales agents. It took BPI over a year to satisfy the requirements for selling imported cosmetics in Mexico; this month, they received approval and an initial order from the Mexican agent they signed during Rep/Com 87. BPI expects this lead to produce at least $300,000 in annual sales. BPI anticipates it will derive a substantial portion of its sales in Japan, where it has developed a novel approach. Yoder said, “We have just completed a 30-day pilot program for nail enamel and lipstick in 50 outlets of a major Japanese retaller. The deal took over a year to negotiate and is geared toward moving all types of products in the future.”

This approach will pay off by April 1989. With the test marketing already concluded as one of the most successful pilot programs in the store’s history, the retailer has committed to placing BPI products in 3,000 of its retail outlets.

Persistence and innovation also was required of BPI in Korea. After filing numerous documents to gain approval for their cosmetics, they have completed transactions in Korea totaling $80,000 this year.

BPI emphasizes the development of intemal and external structures which facilitate efficient and competitive movement of goods and services. It approaches every product with long range and stable sales growth as the objective and places key importance on accommodating the specific requirements of each market.

Initially representing cosmetics from one U.S. manufacturer, BPI is moving quickly into a broad range of consumer products. As of this month, BPI represents five U.S. manufacturers and is working with agents and distributors in 14 countries. The firm expects to double both these figures by the end of 1989

Ron Walker is on a mission. His quest: To bring science, technology and cosmetology together to develop “tecnologically soud” hair care and beauty products. So far the 47-year-old entrepreneur has been successful. As president of R.M. Walker HealthCare Products Co. Inc., a $2 million firm based in Tucker, Ga., Walker recently introduced his own line of relaxers, conditioners and shampoos.Unveiling his own product line has been a longheld dream for Walker, who has over 25 years of experience in the hair care industry. However, when he launched R.M. Walker in 1987 with $500,000 in personal savings, Walker started out as a consultant, not a manufacturer. (Walker owns 49% of the company; Vice President Francis Guess, who is black, controls 14%, and Ray Danner, who is white, owns 8%. Walker says that he has three other minor investors.)Walker recalls, adding that R.M. Walker’s first client was Schering-Plough Corp., a Madison, N.J.-based pharmaceutical and consumer-products company. When Schering-Plough decided to concentrate on its pharmaceutical operations, Walker decided to research and develop his own line of products geared toward African-Americans.

Thanks to his connections, Walker in 1987 was ableto get Schering-Plough to invest $3 million over a three-year period for research and development. And the research has paid off. In early 1991, the “kink Wave Memory System,” a complete line of wave and relaxer products, was introduced to hair stylists during the National Black Hair Fashion Group’s semi-annual educational retreat in Chicago.

Because warm weather brings its own set of beauty challenges (frizzy hair, oily skin, anyone?), it’s easy for your wallet to feel a lot lighter after a seasonal shopping spree down any beauty aisle. But the reality is you don’t have to max out your credit card to look great this summer. “It is possible to find quality, inexpensive products,” says Lily Kimmel, makeup director at the Juva Medispa Skin & Laser Center in New York City. So we scoured cosmetics counters and drugstores to find bargain solutions to common summer beauty problems. Clean & Clear Daily Pore Cleansing Cloths ($6) and Olay Refreshing Toner ($4; both at drugstores) Because skin is oilier in the summer, use gel or salicylic-acid-based cleansers and exfoliate regularly (these textured wipes do the trick). Using toner also helps combat oil buildup (Olay’s contains witch hazel and aloe, so it won’t dry out your skin).

Redken Sun Shape Swim Cream ($10;800-REDKEN-8) UV rays, salt water and chlorine can damage your hair and cause color to fade. So whenever you’re heading outdoors, protect tresses with products that contain UV filters like this leave-in treatment.

John Frieda Beach Blonde Lemon Lights ($7; at drugstores) Saving for a beach vacation? Skip the salon highlights and massage in this gel, which contains real lemon (to help bring out hair’s natural highlights) and added moisturizers to counteract the lemon’s acidity, preventing locks from drying out. Clairol Herbal Essences Fruit Fusions body wash ($4; at drugstores), Aveeno Skin Smoothing Body Scrub ($7; at drugstores) and Garden Botanika Salt Glow Exfoliating Scrub ($10; gardenbotanika.com) First, shower with one of these fruit-smoothie-scented moisturizing cleansers (out next month). Then scrub away dryness to help uncover radiant skin (and allow the skin to absorb self-tanners more evenly).

Gillette For Women Satin Care Anti Nicks & Cuts Shave Gel ($3) and Calgon Silky Skin Shave Mousse ($5; both at drugstores) Prepare your legs for bikini season by using a shaving cream with the natural skin soothers vitamin E and aloe to prevent nicks and razor burn.

SPF to Go Single-Use Sunscreen Packets ($1 each; spftogo.com) and L’Occitane Refreshing and Cleansing Cloths ($10 for 15; loccitane.com) Carry a few of these single-use packets in your bag to protect yourself from unexpected sun exposure and to help keep skin sweat-free.

L’Oreal Ombrelle Sunscreen Sport Spray SPF 15 ($9; at drugstores), beComing Resist The Elements SPF 30 Sunscreen for Face ($14; ibecome.com) and Blistex Fruit Smoothies SPF 15 lip balm ($3 for three; at drugstores) Broad-spectrum sunscreens are the best bargains of all, because by wearing them on a regular basis you’ll save yourself from a sunburn and the signs of premature aging — think wrinkles and sunspots.

Maybelline Brow Styling Gel ($6; at drugstores) “Groomed brows can make all the difference in how you look — even without makeup,” says Los Angeles makeup artist Robin Siegel. Clear brow-grooming gel keeps them in place whether you’re working out, biking, sailing or just out on the town.

Max Factor Lashfinity ($7; at drugstores), Clinique Moisture Sheer Lipstick SPF15 ($14; clinique.com) and Origins Rain and Shine Liptint SPF 15 ($12; origins.com) Keep your makeup to a minimum when the temperature rises. A coat of waterproof mascara and a swipe of sheer lip color with SPF are all you need to look polished easily — and inexpensively, Siegel says.

Physicians Formula Les Botaniques bronzer ($12; physiciansformula.com) and Revlon Skinlights Diffusing Tints SPF 15 ($14; at drugstores) Wearing a heavy foundation can only worsen the ‘I’m melting” feeling caused by summer heat. Opt instead to put a fresh face forward by smoothing on a bronzer, tinted moisturizer or light-diffusing product that’s lightweight, yet will still even out your skin tone.

RELATED ARTICLE: bargain-hunting basics

There’s a time to splurge and a time to save. Learn from the experts with these Ups.

* Invest in your skin. If you’re not happy with your skin, it may be worth it to spend money on a consultation with a dermatologist. No matter what makeup you use or what your hair looks like, healthy skin will always enhance your overall appearance.

* Spend the least on cleansers. “Cleansers are only in contact with the skin for about 20 seconds,” says Mount Kisco, N.Y., dermatologist David E. Bank, M.D. “If you want to splurge, spend your money on something that’s on the skin for hours, like a moisturizer with SPF or a night cream.”

* Splurge on a great hairstylist. “Find a junior stylist at a top salon instead of going to a cheap salon,” says Cheryl Marks, a Los Angeles-based hairstylist with Cloutier. “These junior stylists typically have good training and get tips from the more experienced (and expensive) ones.”

* Be an online bargain hunter. You can get great bargains without leaving your desk. For deals on niche and expensive brands, search sites like sephora.com or beauty.com. For drugstore-brand discounts, check out drugstore.com.

Diet Aids Carry Weight With H&BA Consumers

Diet aids, ethnic and professional hair care products, eye care and new products with an “environmental” positioning were among the categories that enlivened health & beauty aids sales last year and are expected to continue stimulating sales in an otherwise sluggish H&BA department this year.

The environmental push is expected to continue to change the face of the H&BA department as new suppliers such as Bio Pure and existing suppliers like Conair develop lines to exploit growing consumer demand for biodegradable and “natural” products. Incontinence products, eased into assortments gradually over the past couple of years is no longer being coupled with feminine hygiene products. Instead, this merchandise is frequently positioned near the pharmacy or in the vicinity of denture cleaners to reflect the evolution of the product area into its own subcategory.

Aggressive advertising by leading suppliers that speak directly to the consumer by using a representative within the user’s peer group, has helped dissolve the stigma surrounding these products. Incontinence products, sonic denture cleaners like those by Denta Plus, and other products are just the start of an H&BA section devoted to the aged.

At the other end of the age spectrum, children’s H&BA products grew in response to new licensing in the category by Johnson & Johnson and Ducair. The latter has developed a broad spectrum of children’s products including bubble bath, bath toys and crayons, and other grooming aids.

Diet products were the star of the health & beauty aids department last year and will continue to generate high volume due to larger space commitments to the category coupled with aggressive advertising, especially of Slim Fast by Thompson Medical.

John Martin, senior vp, merchandising at Boston Distributors, Maple Heights, Ohio, said his company experienced very high double-digit volume growth in diet aids. New product introductions by Thompson, including individual Slim Fast packets and premixed canned Slim Fast (to be introduced in October) will lead to even higher sales levels in 1991.

Boston Distributors makes shipments of health & beauty aids and other products to over 1,500 stores, predominantly on the East Coast.

Eye care products for contact lens wearers continued to be a high-volume product area at Boston Distributors, Martin noted. Aggressive marketing efforts by disposable contact lens manufacturers does not appear to have made any impact on sales of cleaners and other products geared toward the non-disposable lens wearer.

The steady rise in the number of black and other ethnic consumers continued to be translated into greater sales of ethnic hair care products in markets affected by this demographic shift. Dollar store operators such as Family Dollar, Dollar General and Bill’s Dollar Stores, which more often are located in markets with large black communities, reaped the benefits of spending on ethnic products.

SAN FRANCISCO — More.com has partnered with New York-based Cosmetics Plus in an effort to provide online shoppers with a broader assortment of beauty care products. The two companies expect to launch a Cosmetics Plus online beauty emporium, cosmeticsplus.com at more.com, in the fourth quarter. The companies will jointly develop the site, but cosmeticsplus.com will remain a separate brand entity featured as more.com’s online beauty store.Through cosmeticsplus.com, more.com will provide its customers access to more than 32,000 beauty items, including prestige and exclusive label beauty products.

Discount store consumers still prefer one health and beauty aids brand, Crest, above all others - and that product is also the one managers rated as the best performing H&BA item.

For the third straight year, Crest was the No. 1 health & beauty aids brand in in DSN’s Consumer Brands Survey, cited as the most preferred brand by just over one-fifth of the shoppers polled, six percentage points above last year’s totals.

But the extensive array of H&BA merchandise resulted in consumers citing of many products in such small numbers that they didn’t gain enough mentions to be listed on the survey. These other items each elicited less than 0.5% of mentions from consumers, but the total weight of these citations was just over 27% of the all responses, almost five percentage points ahead of Crest.

While brands continue to be very important in the H&BA arena, surveyed shoppers showed a weakening inclination to buy national brands probably the result of so many alternatives in each subcategory.

In fact, the expressed preference dropped 10 percentage points from last year’s probe to 82% on the current survey. H&BA shoppers are also among the most confident they will find what they are looking for. Of these shoppers, 52% said they are sure they will find the brand they seek.

K mart and Wal-Mart customers showed the strongest preference for particular brands, with 82% of the former’s shoppers and 81% of the latter’s customers indicating interest in specific items. Target shoppers showed the least brand consciousness, with 72% denoting a preference for brands. Last year, 94% of Wal-Mart shoppers voiced an interest in brands, the greatest preference among consumers of the major discounters.

K mart customers, meanwhile, showed the least concern with only 91% saving they had a brand preference.

The strong showing among specific brands by Crest had two effects: it cut into the mention of other top products as consumer citation of other brands declined, and it resulted in major shifts in the ranks of other H&BA items.

Suave, which didn’t make the top 10 chart last year, shot into the No. 2 spot, replacing Colgate, which fell to No. 6.

Besides Suave, other brands that broke in to the Top 10 this year were: Charmin (No. 3); Coast (No. ; and Zest (No. 10).

A 40% change in the listing of the brands isn’t unusual for H&BA, as the shoppers surveyed cited 64 national brands as well as noting such others as store brands and local labels.

Beauty, as an industry, is no longer concentrated in capitals of fashion New York and Los Angeles. A bevy of beauty product makers call South Florida home and are cashing in on the area’s celebrity and reputation as a trendy tropical oasis.

“Florida is a magnet for the beauty industry because it is one of the strongest beauty care markets in the country,” says Larry Oskin, president of Fairfax, Va.-based Marketing Solutions, a beauty industry consultancy. “There is more consumer demand, so Florida has more outlets than most states driving business to the consumer.” The attraction for multinational companies such as Elizabeth Arden, and smaller firms such as i-bella and Samy Cos., comes down to South Florida demographics. The area is replete with baby boomers, Hispanics, Latin Americans and African-Americans who, on average, use more beauty products and services than the rest of the nation’s population, Oskin says, and that “good mix” is the prime reason why Florida is the No. 4 consumer of those goods in the United States, behind New York, California and Texas.

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For suppliers, it makes sense to be in close proximity to their consumer base, experts say. The Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association–the personal care products industry trade association–has approximately 17 members in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

One of those is Elizabeth Arden, the company named after its founder, who opened the first modern beauty salon in 1910. South Florida-based FFI Fragrances acquired Arden from personal products giant Unilever in 2001 and adopted the Elizabeth Arden name as its own. Early this year, the company shed half its South Florida workforce but kept its CEO and 100 financing, sales and marketing staff working from its corporate headquarters in Miami Lakes. Most of Arden’s manufacturing and distribution operations are now based in Roanoke, Va.

Elizabeth Arden’s net sales for fiscal year 2004 increased 8.3 percent to $814.4 million, exceeding the expectations of industry analysts–the cosmetics and toiletries market last year grew a paltry 0.7 percent, according to market research firm Euromonitor International. Thank star power for Arden’s boost.

The company derives 75 percent of its sales from fragrance lines, including celebrity-endorsed scents from pop singer Britney Spears and movie star Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the fashion houses of Halston and Geoffrey Beene. It was the US launch of Arden’s Provocative Women fragrance, and the accompanying marketing blitz with actress and pitchwoman Catherine Zeta-Jones, that led to increased sales through retail mass merchandisers, the company said in its Aug. 6 earnings release.

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Small Packages

Most of South Florida’s beauty firms operate in the enormous shadow of Arden, but industry experts say size is not everything and small- to midsize cosmetic companies do thrive in South Florida.

Lauren Anderson ended her 23-year career with cosmetics giant Estee Lauder to move to South Florida eight years ago. Now CEO of the Fort Lauderdale-based training and development firm Lauren Anderson Associates, she says, chief among the reasons for operating here are plentiful office and warehouse space and a well-trained labor force, which are all less expensive than in New York. And she adds that tapping the Latin American market, for example, is easier from a South Florida base.

“You’re not going to get the Estee Lauders of the world to relocate here, but for smaller firms, there are obvious advantages to being in South Florida,” Anderson says.

It was access to the east coast of the US that attracted entrepreneur Lawrence LaDove to South Florida. In 1971, he launched LaDove Inc., a private-label hair and skin care company in Miami.

“At the time, California was the hotbed of the hair care industry, so to go out there and compete did not make sense,” says Sheree LaDove Kent, LaDove’s daughter and the firm’s current CEO.

Business grew nationwide and then overseas but LaDove remained in South Florida because of its trained workforce and the relative ease of traveling from Miami to international destinations. With backing from private investors, Kent bought her father’s stake in the company in 2000 and launched an effort to expand the company’s client base, distribution channels and product lines.

“My father’s philosophy was to run the business for [his] lifestyle, and it did provide a wonderful lifestyle, but I really wanted to grow the company,” Kent says. Today, LaDove manufactures approximately 1,200 different personal care products, from economy lines sold at mass retailers (brands such as Charles Worthington) to more exclusive professional salon products such as Tigi Bed Head, Catwalk and Regis Design Line.

To accommodate its increased product lines, the company recently more than tripled its manufacturing footprint by moving into a 140,000-square-foot factory in Miami Lakes. That facility houses laboratories, corporate offices and product manufacturing, with more than 100 full-time employees.

As they say…anything for a story. On a recent Saturday Morning, I braved the road construction to reach Faces II Day Spa of Mequon, Wisconsin. I was about to receive my very first Mehndi Body Art Tattoo.

The artist, Julia was ready for me the minute I walked in. A full time college student, Julia explained that she doesn’t have time in her life for the artwork that she loves to do, so she found a way to combine her art skills with a part time job as a Mehndi artist. “Mehndi,” she explained, “is a Henna tattoo that is applied to the skin as a paste. The paste reacts to the skin’s natural heat, dyeing the skin in the design that was applied.”

Julia had several design books to choose from. I marveled at the intricate designs available, traditionally applied to hands and feet, but a few very brave souls in her portrait portfolio had had some beautiful belly-button work done. Lacking that particular kind of courage, I opted for a simple curly-cue design forming a bracelet around my right wrist.

The procedure is not at all complicated. Julia likes to mix her own Henna paste, but it also is available in pre-mixed bottles. Quite the naturalist, Julia said she prefers her own mixes because then she knows they are preservative-free. The same theme applies to the resulting color. Because Henna is a natural plant product, the finished stain could be any variety of hue from tan to deep brown, occasionally red. It is possible to find some colored pre-made mixes, but that would be artificial coloring, which strongly contradicts with the ancient art of Mehndi.

Using a small bottle identical to those used for fabric painting, Julia quickly copied the design I had chosen, freehand, rather than using any type of pattern. When I remarked at how steady her hand was at such speed she laughed, “comes with practice.” Although most people choose traditional Mehndi designs, she admits she can copy any design a customer wants. Less than 15 minutes after she started, I had a black, puffy design on my wrist, and I was offered the option of having her blow-dry it, or just air dry. Patience not being a strong virtue, after 5 minutes I changed my mind and requested the blow dryer.

Julia explained the care I would need to give my tattoo. As soon as it was dry she blotted on a mixture of half lemon juice and half sugar. “The acidity of the lemon juice will darken the dye, and the sugar will help the lemon juice adhere. Both also help to moisten the paste which also aids the darkening process.” A customer who does not want to stay and wait for drying can easily do this step at home. I was to leave the paste on for approximately 5 hours, and avoid getting it wet. The paste is then easily flaked off, and olive oil wiped on to remove any paste residue. The resulting tattoo will last from 2 to 4 weeks, depending on how often and with what type of soaps are used to wash it.

While doing my research on the history of Mehndi, I found out just how fortunate I am to have my new Henna tattoo. I am now safe from The Evil Eye, Black Magic, harmful Genies, and a host of other dangerous supernatural forces. The art of applying Henna (Mehndi) dates back at least 5,000 years. It originated in Egypt and the Middle East, and was spread to India by the Muslims. The most traditional use of Mehndi was during special occasions and celebrations; weddings, births, deaths, even first menstruations. At these life events, women were thought to be most vulnerable to evil spirits and the application of Henna was a form of protection for them. Individual designs have specific meanings; a few of which are luck, health, fertility, sun, moon, etc. The Art of Mehndi is now gaining popularity in the United States, with celebrities such as Madonna, Demi Moore, and The Artist Occasionally Known as Prince displaying their Henna tattoos.

What is a classic? One definition says that a classic is something that has been judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality, a work of art of established value. The classic perfumes of yesteryear that are still being produced, marketed and used by scores of women fall into this category.

Trendy fragrances fall in and out of popularity sometimes after a whiff or just on a whim. Celebrity endorsed perfumes ride the crest of the wave until somebody younger or prettier comes along with a new one. True classic perfumes don’t need to be endorsed by anyone. They stand alone and they stay forever. A classic scent can be worn and enjoyed by any generation of women.

Shalimar by Guerlain is a French perfume that has this true staying power. It was introduced in1925. Shalimar is composed of a mixture of musk, vanilla and night-blooming flowers. At the time Jacques Guerlain was fascinated by things oriental in nature. He named his new fragrance after “The Gardens of Shalimar,” where an Indian Emperor met the love of his life, and went on to build the Taj Mahal for her.

I remember my mother wearing White Shoulders by Evyan. It was first introduced back in 1949. Gardenia, lilac, amber jasmine and oakmoss make up this timeless classic.

Another classic scent is Je Reviens by Worth. Je Reviens was introduced by the Design House of Worth in 1932. It has been inspiring romance ever since. It contains the scent of soft green floral fragrance, orange flower, lemon, musk, rose and violet. Je Reviens Cologne for men was inspired by this women’s timeless classic and wasn’t introduced until 1980.

Many of my peers enjoyed, Heaven Sent by Dana. I doubt any of them realized it was first introduced back in 1936. Heaven Sent’s fragrance is that of oriental spices and aromatic woods.

Joy by Jean Patou was first introduced in 1930. A single ounce of Joy contains 10,600 jasmine flowers and 336 may roses, along with a hint of ylang-ylang and tuberose. Joy was intended to bring joy back to the population of women who had been brought down by the Great Depression. This sophisticated scent is still considered to be the world’s costliest perfume.

Chanel No. 5, by the design house of Chanel, is a blend of ylang-ylang, amber, iris, patchouli, grass jasmine, may rose, sandalwood, neroli, and vanilla which together form a soft and refined floral scent that has been loved by women since its introduction in 1922. Coco Chanel was looking for a fragrance that would define what a woman should smell like. Perfume designer, Ernest Beaux came up with Chanel No, 5 on his fifth try. The name stuck.

While looking for a signature scent for yourself, don’t just jump on the latest trend. Consider something that has proven itself to have lasting appeal. After all, every woman is a timeless classic in her own right.