Modern Muse in Hong Kong

Travel Editorial featuring Estée Lauder Modern Muse Le Rouge Gloss Eau de Parfum

It’s one of those truisms so easy to assimilate into one’s reality – like the fact that egg tarts hold the joy of life, or that vacay brain thrives on longer purse strings – that certain stimuli of the senses have mystical powers over the human mind. For example, that colours can influence mood and perception, and scents can evoke powerful feelings.

Here in Hong Kong, whether such postulations are based in science is largely irrelevant. Notwithstanding its vertical concrete habitats, neon sign forests, and other such demonstrations of its ultra-modernity, the tradition (or perhaps, superstition) of the colour red is faithfully observed. It is used to signify luck and prosperity in life, power and rightfulness in politics, and sexual desire in love.  But for the Chinese, rather than being a show of prevailing confidence, it is a gesture in invitation of the same, or, even, in expectation. One needs only to observe the concrete and glass facades of Hong Kong’s islands, greeting each other each night across the harbour with an extravagant light show, aflood in the colour red.

Amongst that backdrop of light and life beating on into the small hours, the luscious warm humidity in the air, and the city’s symphony of reveling voices, interspersed the spicy-sweet lacquered scent of Estée Lauder Modern Muse Le Rouge Gloss. Each seemed a kind of reflection of the other – Hong Kong, whose power lies in its peacock-like displays of its extroverted soul, and the bold, uninhibited Le Rouge Gloss, which foreshadows attraction even before eyes would meet across the aged wooden deck of a red-sailed junk.

Is this the secret of the Modern Muse? In a city where the source of confidence is confidence itself, the donning of the colour red conveys power, wearing a fragrance evokes one’s femme fatale alter-ego, and so too, assuming an attitude of confidence and sexiness is a truth unto itself. In other words, it is the ancient art of ‘fake it till you make it’.

Created in collaboration with Estée Lauder.

Location: Hong Kong, China | Photography: Miheer Sabale

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