prescriptives: you’re breaking my little heart!

As a teenager, half a lifetime ago it seems, I was secretly obsessed with malls. Having grown up in Brooklyn where you slipped in and out of shops, plucked sweaters out of $1 bins, and the fitting room was a water closet, the shimmery lights and Grecian fountains of Long Island malls mystified me. Pristine parquet floors and women with perfectly-coiffed hair greeting me with a crystal bottle clutched in their hands, waiting for their spritz moment, was a near ethereal experience. I spent most of my weekends traveling on buses, roaming Green Acres, Sunrise, Walt Whitman and Roosevelt Field malls. These were the days of A&S, of cruising the food courts and chatting on payphones. It would be almost a year before I would make a purchase.

By the time I left for college, malls had lost a little of their luster, but I still made my occasional, private sojourns. I still munched on a Johnny Rocket cheeseburger and combed the Banana Republic, The Limited and J Crew sale racks. During winter break my freshman year, I made my first “major” fragrance purchase: Prescriptives’ Calyx. I remember the holiday box set and the sumptuous body cream and foaming gel, which accompanied my fragrance. At eighteen, it felt oddly grand to own something so luxurious, something from a counter in a store that sold sapphires and shearling coats, and I think I might have savored my fragrant indulgence, used in sparingly, for the months after.

And although it’s been years since I’ve worn Calyx, when I learned that Prescriptives plans to discontinue distribution at the end of January 2010, I was a bit sad. It was as if another door in a long list of memories had quietly closed. If the things you remember, albeit minor, were slowly being replaced by shiny, new things. Call me old. Call me sentimental, but when I return to my old neighborhoods and haunts and see the replacements — I cringe. Because part of me wants to know that things will continue to quietly exist.

So I’ve decided to hold onto a memory, even for a little while longer. I’m checking out their swan song on Twitter, picking up some shimmery colors from their holiday collection because their makeup is that fantastic and I crave a little nostalgia, and connecting with a brand that held a sweet memory.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 7:19 pm and is filed under beauty, fashion & style, fab finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.