CHINATOWN SCENTED CANDLE

Quick—Name New York’s most dynamic, most exuberant, most flavorful, most colorful, most rapidly expanding neighborhood? Answer: Chinatown—the new Chinatown, suffused both with emerging superpower energy and with the avant-garde cachet of downtown New York. (In case you hadn’t noticed, Chinatown is morphing at the edges with Soho, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side.) Naturally, Bond No. 9 (always alert to neighborhood nuiances) has captured the essence of this high-energy swathe of Lower Manhattan for its latest New York-centric fragrance, and names it none other than Chinatown.

What's in this seductively dynamic eau de parfum? Its top note is a burst of peach blossom - a mystic fruit in Chinese mythology that Taoists consider the elixir of life. The midnotes are an intoxicating cross-cultural bouquet: Peony (known as Sho Yo, or Most Beautiful, the Chinese flower of love, luxury and indulgence), blended with creamy-sweet gardenia (the flower Billie Holiday wore in her hair) and sultry tuberose (known in the Western world as the Mistress of the Night), and mouth-watering patchouli, which adds a spiky note to the other florals. The lingering base notes are cardamom (an ancient spice from the East, long used as a condiment) and dark woods (recalling the scent of Chinese inlaid lacquered boxes). Bond No. 9's Chinatown carries forward the long tradition of the so-called oriental perfumes that held sway in the 20th century. But ours is innovative - it's the first to add a New York aesthetic to the mix.