The product line includes all your standard smelly stuff: candles, salt scrubs, hand creams and body butters. Sophia Sylvester—the entrepreneurial implant behind it all—claims the idea for Brooklyn Flavors came when none of the other drugstore scents would satisfy her children’s dry, cracked hands. “Nothing over the counter would help,” she writes. Her solution? Loosely appropriate borough culture into recognizable, locally-sourced ingredients. After all, your I-live-in-Bed-Stuy hands will do better if you put Bed-Stuy cream (sandalwood, jasmine, cedarwood and patchouli) on them.
But it’s not just Brooklyn neighborhoods that are getting the fragrant treatment. Sylvester’s also drawn from the general swaths of Brooklyn reference, offering up “Brownstone” candles and “Church Av” salt scrub. She also has a “Who’s Your Daddy?” scent. (Sorry, we can’t for the life of us imagine where in Brooklyn they’re asking that question.) And not every neighborhood gets a flavor. Bushwick and Sunset park got shafted in favor of “MoBay Punch,” a scent that’s blatantly just inspired by a city in Jamaica. Heck, the Ditmas Park scent is already slated to be discontinued.
This isn’t the first time that someone tried to make us all smell like Brooklyn. But at least it was married to something equally ridiculous, i.e. the advent of all things beard. But would you pay $8 to coat your lips with a bunch of scents that don’t even approach the experience of walking down your street every day?
View Comments (1)
I've read about this company many times before. Fortunately for them this is the only negative write up I know about. Interesting, especially because I think that what you are writing here may not be entirely factual based on what I've read before. I don't know, I just find that hard to believe because it doesn't match up..
Either way someone is doing something right because here you are talking about them and they may not even know of your mere existence. Not to mention that I'm the only one commenting on this post.