If you sit in a gray cubicle under a fluorescent light day after day, you might dream about working for a designer out of a 17th-century canal house in Amsterdam. It sounds idyllic — until you consider the potential ghosts living in the building. Do you think those trapped souls want to listen to sewing machines and clanking perfume bottles and arguments over creative vision all day? They do not — at least not the ones haunting the Viktor & Rolf atelier.
As Viktor Horsting tells it, when he and his design partner Rolf Snoeren came into the office, they were told by employees that the space was haunted. (Talk about company loyalty — we would have been clearing out our desks at the first sign of a spirit acting creepy.) "Several people said there was a phone ringing [with no one on the other line] and footsteps, so we got somebody in to get rid of all the negative energy in the house. She burned sage, walked around the building, and stuck a feather on each door."
The sage, Horsting says, smelled so good, they decided to create a fragrance around it. And so, along with five other scents all part of Viktor & Rolf's latest Magic Collection, Sage Spell was born.
It's a great story, and the smell of a burning bundle of herbs is very pleasant when dispersed throughout the house, but we worried the note, combined with wormwood (the stuff in absinthe), might make our skin smell like a Portland gift shop.
We shouldn't have. It's clean and crisp, lighter than expected, and worked just like aromatherapeutic lavender on our mood, Zen-ing us out for a few minutes in the middle of the work day. Then again, the R29 offices aren't haunted (we don't think), so here's hoping the perfume casts a powerful enough spell to clear the fashion house ghosts and calm our Dutch friends. If not, there's always legal marijuana there.
Viktor & Rolf Magic Collection Sage Spell, $220, available at Saks in March 2017.