Lucky No.5

Of the many stories, myths, and just all around Chanel lore that I can’t seem to get out of my head yet was that Coco Chanel designed her first Chanel No.5 bottle to perfectly match the shape of Place Vendome … where the Ritz Paris is, and where Madame Coco Chanel basically lived. Although her apartment for inspiration and taking guests was just behind it on Rue Cambon. They also claimed that it is unknown whether this matching shape was intentional… and its not like they had “Google Maps” back in 1921. So I had to check. Strange it may seemed but the rational part of me assumed the Chanel folks wouldn’t just make something like this up. And as you see, they weren’t kidding. The parfum bottle No.5 really fits the Place Vendome proportions!

French Women...

Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire: Business Sense & Sensibility

When Mireille Guiliano became a senior executive and spokesperson for Veuve Clicquot, she took the Champagne to the top of the luxury market, using her distinctive French woman's philosophy and style. Now she uses those same talents and savoir faire to help readers pop their own corks and get the mostout of life. Drawing on her experiences at the front lines and highest echelons of the business world, she gives women (and a few men, peut-être) the practical advice they need to make the most of work without skimping on all the other good things in life.

With lively lessons, stories, and helpful hints, Mireille teaches every reader how to identify her own passions and talents, improve her communication skills, balance work and life, cope with everyday stress, turn herself into a winning brand, and so much more. From acing a job interview or performance review to hosting a simple but elegant dinner party, Mireille tells it like it is as she shares her secrets for achieving happiness and success at any stage in business and life.

Stylish, witty, and wise, Mireille segues easily from the small details to the big picture, never losing sight of what is most important: feeling good, facing challenges, getting ahead, and maximizing pleasure at every opportunity.

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French Women Don't Sleep Alone

Did you know that French women don't date?  American women have been missing out on a few secrets when it comes to the opposite sex. French women believe that the gift for attracting men has nothing to do with beauty, work, or even motivation. There are no Rules. And they don't listen to Dr. Phil's advice. They don't worry about the care and feeding of their boyfriend. And they certainly don't travel to Mars to communicate with men. On the contrary, French women's love lives are romantic, sensual, playful, and intense. They conduct their relationships with the same unique sense of originality and artfulness that they choose their clothes and accessories. For the first time ever, Jamie Cat Callan gives readers a personalized, guided tour through the corridors of French love.  Just as we've learned to stop torturing ourselves with fad diets and have relearned the art of eating, this witty, insightful, and candid book strives to show American women how to cultivate and enjoy the pleasures of love, romance, and marriage.  Includes delicious recipes for the perfect, amorous meal!

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Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl



British expatriate Powell, a regular contributor to the Sunday Times and other newspapers, explores the allure of French women, including their sense of style and their feelings about relationships, diet, exercise, work, and family. In witty prose, she interviews politicians, former models, beauty pageant queens, and others to get the scoop on how French women stay thin, attractive, sexy, and chic no matter their age. Shopping is a form of exercise, but going to a gym is unheard of, just as wearing tennis shoes or exercise clothes when not exercising is unthinkable. This book is similar to Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl by American writer Debra Ollivier, except the comparisons are between British and French women. At the conclusion of the work, one is left wondering whether any woman would want to emulate the style of Frenchwomen, as sensible as many of their ideas are, because they come off like chain-smoking perfectionists who obsess over themselves to the detriment of having close female friendships.

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All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French 



The allure of the Frenchwoman—sexy, sophisticated, flirtatious, and glamorous—is legendary. More than an eye for fashion or a taste for elegance, the French je ne sais quoi embodies the essential ingredients for looking and feeling beautiful. With wit, whimsy, and wonder, British expatriate Helena Frith Powell uncovers the secrets of chic living in All You Need to Be Impossibly French, a cheeky guide to releasing your inner Frenchwoman. Delving deep into a mysterious realm of face creams, silk lingerie, and shopping- as-exercise, Powell reveals how French women stay impossibly thin and irresistibly sexy by achieving the maximum effect from the minimum amount of effort. Forget diet and inspiration books and style guides—this is all you need to embrace the wisdom of French living, and learn how to turn every day into la petite aventure.

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The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman



Chanel is credited not simply with giving us the little black dress and boxy jackets, but popularising pants for women and easy, practical clothes that allowed women a chic freedom they'd never known before. In her strong-headed, elegant, opinionated, passionate, entirely French way, Coco Chanel helped bring women into the modern era, and because of this she was the only person in fashion to be named "Time" magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. Karen Karbo weaves Chanel's life story into chapter themes that subtly convey life lessons and leave the reader utterly entranced with Chanel's amazing individuality, confidence, and determination. The story of the designer's extraordinary life and rise to unprecedented success is both compelling and admirable. And while the great Coco may have launched her singular empire a hundred years ago, her methods, attitude, and elan are as relevant and modern as ever, and perhaps more appealing. Chanel was a self-made girl who knew how to make do with less until she had more, discover and stay true to her own style, problem-solve using the tools at hand, and do it all with seemingly effortless flair.

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Different Like Coco



The rags-to-riches story of Coco Chanel plays out in a wonderful picture-book biography as full of style and spirit as its heroine.  Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was always different. And she vowed to prove that being different was an advantage! Poor, skinny, and orphaned, Coco stubbornly believed that she was as good as the wealthier girls of Paris. Tapping into her creativity and her sewing skills, she began making clothes that suited her (and her pocketbook) — and soon a new generation of independent working women craved her sleek, comfortable, and practical designs. Now an icon of fashion and culture, Coco Chanel continues to inspire young readers, showing just how far a person can come with spunk, determination, and flair.

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A  Guide to Elegance : For Every Woman Who Wants to Be Well and Properly Dressed on All Occasions



Written by French style guru Madame Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, Elegance is a classic style bible for timeless chic, grace, and poise — every tidbit of advice today's woman could possibly need, all at the tips of her (perfectly manicured) fingers. From Accessories to Zippers, Madame Dariaux imparts her pearls of wisdom on all things fashion-related — and also offers advice on other crucial areas in life from shopping with girlfriends (don't) to marriage and sex.

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Ooh la La! A French Romp



Take two voluptuous dames of a certain age, one fond of a romp in the lavender fields, the other an anxious first-time tour operator. Add eight expectant tour guests, throw them together in the French countryside with lashings of good food and wine, and you have Ooh la la! A French Romp—one of the funniest books you'll ever read about laughing, loving and travelling in France. A true celebration of life.

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What French Women Know About Love and Sex



It's not the shoes, the scarves, or the lipstick that gives French women their allure. It's this: French women don't give a damn. They don't expect men to understand them. They don't care about being liked or being like everyone else. They generally reject notions of packaged beauty. They accept the passage of time, celebrate the immediacy of pleasure, like to break rules, embrace ambiguity and imperfection, and prefer having a life to making a living. They are, in other words, completely unlike us.  Ollivier goes beyond familiar ooh-la-la stereotypes about French women, challenging cherished notions about sex, love, dating, marriage, motherhood, raising children, body politics, seduction, and flirtation. Less a how-to and more a how-not-to, What French Women Know offers a refreshing counterpoint to the stale love dogma of our times. Peppered with anecdotes from its Franco-American author and filled with provocative ideas from French sexperts, mistresses and maidens alike, it debunks longstanding myths, presenting savvy new thinking from an old sexy culture and more realistic, life-affirming alternatives from the land that knows how to love.

From Russia with love...

Matryoshka Doll

A matryoshka doll, also known as a Russian nested doll, is a set of dolls of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. "Matryoshka”   is presumably derived from the Russian female first name "Matryona".  A set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure which can be pulled apart to reveal another figure of the same sort inside. It has, in turn, another figure inside, and so on. The number of nested figures is usually five or more. The shape is mostly cylindrical, rounded at the top for the head and tapered towards the bottom, but little else; the dolls have no hands (except those that are painted). Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a sarafan. Inside, it contains other figures that may be of both genders, usually ending in a baby that does not open. The artistry is in the painting of each doll, which can be extremely elaborate.

Matryoshkas date from 1890, and are said to have been inspired by souvenir dolls from Japan. The concept of nested objects was familiar in Russia at that time, having been applied to carved wooden apples and Easter eggs. The first Russian nested doll set was carved by Vasiliy Zvezdochkin from a design by Sergei Maliutin, who was a folk crafts painter in the Abramtsevo estate of the Russian industrialist and patron of arts Savva Mamontov. The doll set was painted by Maliutin himself. Maliutin's design was inspired by a set of Japanese wooden dolls representing Shichi-fuku-jin, the Seven Gods of Fortune. Maluitin's doll set consisted of eight dolls -- the outermost was a girl holding a rooster, six inner dolls were girls, the fifth doll was a boy, and the innermost was a baby. In 1900, Savva Mamontov's wife presented the dolls at the World Exhibition in Paris, and the toy earned a bronze medal. Soon after, matryoshki dolls were being made in several places in Russia.

All about Elephants...

The elephant is the largest animal that lives on land. Some male elephants can grow to be thirteen feet tall. That's more than twice as tall as many human adults. Elephants can weigh as much as a school bus—between ten and fourteen thousand pounds! Elephants smell, drink, eat, and wash themselves with their long trunks. They have tusks—long teeth made of ivory—that help them get food and carry heavy objects. The most obvious characteristic of elephants, besides their massive size, is their trunk.  The trunk is nothing more than an elongation of their nose and upper lip.   Besides being used for breathing and smelling it is also used as an appendage, much like an arm or hand.  Elephants are capable of pulling up to 11.5 liters (3 gallons) of water into the trunk to be sprayed into the mouth for drinking or onto the back for bathing.  They also use two fingerlike projections that are at the tip to manipulate small objects and to pluck grasses.

Elephants eat grass, small branches, and bark from trees. They especially like leaves from the top branches. They get the leaves by pushing down the trees with their large heads and bodies. Then they get the bark by scraping it with their sharp tusks. Most elephants live in the grasslands of Africa and in the forests of Asia. They live in groups called herds. The herd is typically composed of up to ten females and their young.  All of the females in the herd are directly related to the matriarch, who is typically the oldest and largest female.  Males beyond the age of maturity are with the herd only during mating. A herd is a group that may have ten or more elephants. It is usually led by a female elephant. Herds have been known to travel ten miles or even farther to look for food and water. When elephants travel, they walk very quietly in single file. Young elephants are led by the older elephants with their tails. They stay close to their mothers at all times. The entire herd will protect the young ones if there's any sign of danger.

Elephants love water and are very good swimmers. When elephants get hot, they swim in lakes or rivers, or give themselves showers using their long trunks. An elephant can also cool off by rolling in a shady bed of mud.  Young elephants stay with their families for many years. It's not unusual for a herd of elephants to live together all of their lives. Elephants are also capable of making low frequency sounds that are below the human range of hearing;  this allows wandering individuals within the herd as well as several different herds to stay in direct contact over distances of many miles.

Elephant Facts ... Did You know ?

• Elephants stomp when they walk.


• Elephants sleep standing up.


• Sometimes baby elephants lie down to sleep.


• Elephants bathe.  Sometimes the spray dirt on themselves to get the parasites off.  Sometimes they bathe in mud


• Elephants live in herds. 


• They cool off by fanning their ears.  This cools the blood in their ears.  That blood goes to the rest of their body and cools off the elephant.


• They poop 80 pounds in one day.


• Elephants weigh 10,000 pounds.  It would take 250 students to add up to 10,000 pounds.


• They collect food with their trunks.


• Only grown up ladies and their babies live in the herds. 


• The daddy elephants leave the herd when they are 12 years old.


• They fight with their tusks.


• They eat grass and bark.


• During the wet season they eat things low to the ground.


• During the dry season they use their trunk to gather food from trees and bushes. 


• They suck up water into their trunks and shoot it into their mouths.


• Elephants need lots of room to roam and eat.  (Some of us think that this must mean they are not happy in the zoo or in the circus.)


• They can run 24mph for short distances.

They're majestic, they're cute... I like them lots lots... nuff' said!