Ericka Duffy is not your average maker of perfumes. She has yet to meet anyone working in scent who has the same job as her, which, in addition to creating fragrances, includes making special “immersive” scents for film festivals, developing alcoholic drinks that take people back in time and putting on scent-inspired cocktail parties.
The 36-year-old trained herself to pick up different aromas after working on the perfume floors of department stores. She has been developing her own fragrances for seven years and has worked for Lush and Gorilla Perfumes. Continue Reading...

I was at a party recently when a twenty-something man asked me what I like to cook at home. I told him I cook quite a lot of French-inspired food and he looked at me with what can only be described as pity. "Don't you find that a bit… limiting?" The "Grandma" was silent.
After a couple of decades of gleefully tucking into Italian, Spanish and now Scandinavian recipes at home, it seems we've fallen out of love with the cuisine that helped reignite our love of food in the 1950s and 1960s. And the younger crowd never fell in love with it at all, associating it with lengthy preparation and elaborate presentation. Cordon Blah just didn't chime with the Jamie Generation. Contiue Reading...

There's something interesting going on at Paco Rabanne. Yes, I mean that slightly naff fashion house whose original Basque-born designer (real name Francisco Rabaneda-Cuervo) found fame in the 1960s with dresses ingeniously constructed from plates of metal and plastic, but whose hitherto notoriety stemmed from his repeated predictions of the apocalypse. Continue Reading...

St Barts' original luxury hotel, Eden Rock St Barths still has enduring star power, but a duo of spruced-up competitors are hoping to attract their fair share of international glitterati.
 
ABC Life Style, Feb-08,2016

In the early 1950s it cost the entrepreneur Remy de Haenen just a few hundred dollars to buy a rocky and disregarded promontory by the Bay of St Jean in St Barts. Back then the people of this remote, minuscule island subsisted primarily on the revenue generated by salt production. The potential London-born Frenchman de Haenen saw in that forgotten stretch of coastline motivated him to open the island’s first luxury hotel, Eden Rock St Barths, in 1953, and in so doing kick-started the metamorphosis of the island from languid, forgotten Caribbean idyll into one of the world’s most exclusive and expensive holiday destinations. Continue Reading...

ABC Life Style, Feb-08,2016

Veronique Nichanian moved away from the notion of heavy winter attire in a collection for a man with an all-weathers approach to style

You get the sense that the Hermès customer doesn’t have to concern himself too much with what will be keeping him warm in winter. Gstaad might get chilly but there’s always the house in St Barths to retreat to once the jet is fired up. And now that the traditional fashion seasons are merging - aided by that small matter of global warming - and that the Hermès man is as international as they come, the house’s offering for AW16 infused a sense of lightness and vivid colour to winter attire Continue Reading...

Five facts that show how the advertising industry fails women

ABC Life Style, Feb-06,2016

Women are the most powerful consumers on the planet, making 85% of all purchasing decisions. Across any sector you can think of – technology, cars, houses, pharmaceuticals – women hold the household purse strings.
In the advertising industry, however, there are very few female creative directors making the adverts that women see. In 2008, just 3.6% of the world’s creative directors were female. Since then it has tripled to 11%; in London, my research shows, the figure is about 14% – still shockingly low. Continue Reading...

 How do I … keep the doctor at bay?

ABC Life Style, Feb-06,2016

When the NHS began in 1948, it cost the modern-day equivalent of about £15bn a year to run. Now that cost stands at £136.7bn and is still rising amid regular predictions that a free-to-use health service will eventually become financially unviable.
So what can you do to ease the financial burden? Here are a few suggestions, some more practical than others. Continue Reading...

CDC tells millions of women to stop drinking, just in case they get pregnant

ABC Life Style, Feb-06,2016

Analysis

If you're a woman of childbearing age who likes to drink, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would like you to stop and consider your future unborn baby.
The government agency recommended Tuesday that women of childbearing age who are not using contraception should abstain from drinking because they might become pregnant and put a hypothetical baby at risk of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs).Continue Reading...

Quitting school and taking a family travel adventure: what Guardian readers say

ABC Life Style, Feb-06,2016

We took a decision to sell up and move to Portugal in 1999 when our kids were three and five years old. We’d both been working hard and hadn’t spent as much time with our kids as we would have liked. Our first child had died at five months old. We chose to rent an apartment in Lisbon. Our kids were thrown in at the deep end in a Portuguese convent kindergarten. They were both speaking almost fluent Portuguese after about four-five months. It was a complete change in lifestyle, food, culture, language and climate that we experienced together – something that bonds us to this day. It was an adventure, exciting, enriching and something everyone should do if they have the guts and the wherewithal to do it. Continue Reading...

The weekend cook: Thomasina Miers’ comfort food recipes

 ABC Life Style, Feb-06,2016

When the days are short and the sunshine scarce, my instinct is to retreat to the sofa and curl up. It’s at times such as these that food needs to nurture. Luckily, nothing gets a cook going faster than that first chop of an onion, in anticipation of dinner on the table; nothing warms you and the kitchen faster than cooking, too. So, make comforting bowlfuls to combat the temperature outside: good old-fashioned braises and nursery food that you can eat with a spoon. Let food be your blanket. Continue Reading...

Meta fashion lessons from the premiere of Zoolander 2

ABC Life Style, Feb-05,2016

The Zoolander 2 premiere at the Empire Leicester Square was billed as a Fashionable Screening. Imagine the kind of pressure that puts those poor stars under. Looking extra fashionable to attend an event you are supposed to be fashionable at to promote a film that lampoons being fashionable. Man, the complexities. And the sheer meta-ness of the whole thing.Continue Reading...

Italian PM Matteo Renzi to open Milan fashion week 

ABC Life Style, Feb-2,2016 

Matteo Renzi has been mocked for his personal fashion foibles in the past, but the Italian prime minister will nevertheless brave the tough crowd of Milan fashion week later this month, becoming the first premier to open the event.
While Renzi is not expected to take a spin down the runway, the move is seen as an important show of support for the beleaguered industry, which has been hit by a slowdown in the Middle East and Russia and a drop-off in the Chinese market.
Renzi’s decision also reflects the image he consistently seeks to portray of himself: that he is a dynamic leader and the face of a modernising Italy. Indeed, he has often used fashion to try to make a statement – from the leather jacket he donned for Chi magazine while he was mayor of Florence (some said he was channelling the Fonz) to the “jeans and no-tie” look that became a symbol of his desire to shake-up the political establishment. Continue Reading...

The hair-choker – throw away your hairbands and tie your hair to your neck

ABC Life Style, Feb-3,2016 

Fashion quiz: this season, should you let your hair down, or wear it up?
Trick question! You should tuck it in. But you knew that, of course. The whole hair-inside-the-turtleneck look is, like, entry-level chic. You’ve been all over that since March 2011, when we reported on Phoebe Philo leaving her hair tucked inside her sweater to take her bow on the Celine catwalk. The I’m-too-cool-to-pull-my-hair-out-of-my-collar is now a near-basic styling trick. (Zara are all over it.) Continue Reading......