Skip the holiday shopping headache

Normally I prefer to spend the pre-holiday stretch hunkering down in the comfort of my home — away from the traffic on the road, and away from the human traffic in our shopping malls. The malls are bad enough on regular days; always full of people. I consider myself mildly agoraphobic; I cannot handle a crowd. I am conveniently not really the gifting kind (sorry, friends), and if I do buy gifts, I tend to one-stop-shop at places not frequented by too many people, so I was looking forward to steering clear of our major shopping meccas and all their midnight sales.

For some reason or another, though, be it meetings, shoots, sourcing, or pull-outs, I’ve had to brave the Christmas crowd in nearly all of the major shopping malls in the Ortigas and Makati areas, and it’s been a nightmare. Woe betide all of you who have yet to get your shopping out of the way, because it’s a war zone, and not even the bad weather from earlier this week scared people off from hitting up the department stores.

Adora in Greenbelt 5, however, is another story. The holiday crush is delightfully absent, the store is spacious and departments are spread out, and everything that’s available has clearly been carefully selected. The shopping experience is actually relaxing.

I popped into Adora earlier this week to have a look-see around the area, and maybe to find myself a fragrance. I worked as a beauty editor for a magazine for four years, and I’ve been sent bottles and bottles and bottles of perfumes for my consideration; my sink is a mess of beautiful scents. For years, I’ve been switching scents along with major milestones. A breakup? The perfume I used over the duration of that relationship goes into the drawer, never to be worn again. New job? Time to try a new bottle. I’ve been trying new scents in phases; each bottle a marker for a specific time in my life, each fragrance associated with a certain set of memories. Lately, though, I realized that I was going about scent selection in the wrong way. I don’t want multiple fragrances to remind me of other people or other things; I want just one signature scent that will forever remind other people of me. The problem is, I haven’t quite found that scent yet.

The selection of fragrances at Adora is somewhat more obscure than the more well-known options available at other department stores, and that suited me just fine — I don’t want to have the same signature scent as half of Manila, and I don’t want people to be able to immediately identify what I’m wearing, which has been the case quite often. (“Oh, you’re wearing (insert perfume brand here)! I don’t know exactly which one, but I’m right, right?” and they always, always are.) I want my scent to be beautiful, mysterious, and unique — just like I would like to be. (Haha!) Adora’s brands — all of them, not just the fragrances — have always been carefully curated; the kinds of brands that you won’t find anywhere else.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a fear of walking through the perfume section of most department stores. I literally feel myself tensing up when I’m about to pass through, because I hate being accosted by sales associates wielding bottles of perfume and strips on which to spritz them, and they always seem to be just lurking and waiting to pounce. I know it’s their job, and of course I would like to be attended to, but I don’t need that kind of persistence or pressure. At Adora, the sales staff approach you and ask you if you need assistance. If you don’t, and you’d like to just look around, they’ll back off until you need them. If you do, they attend to you with a very high level of expertise on the products they’re responsible for.

I spoke with one of their fragrance profilers, Mary Ann, while I was there, and as she took me around the fragrance department, painstakingly explaining the different fragrances, the brands’ history, and my options, it immediately hit me that she really knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t just mouthing off memorized information from the product packet; she really understood the whole concept of perfume, possibly even better than I did. She asked me pertinent questions — what kinds of scents did I typically gravitate towards? What kind of lifestyle did I lead, and did I need something for every day, something for just special occasions, or something that could straddle both? Did I prefer fresh scents for daytime, or floral ones? She took in all of that information, picked out a number of fragrances for me to consider from Maison Francis Kurkdjian and Penhaligon’s, and finally spritzed one from the latter on my wrist (from among many!) that ended up being something I really, really liked. (I could still smell it on myself 12 hours later, and loved it just as much. Another thing I loved: The his-and-hers scents are named Artemisia and Endymion, after Greek myth, which is so much more creative than ____ for Him and ___ for Her.) It was customer service on another level, and that’s always been my experience with Adora. The staff are just as knowledgeable in all departments, and I love that they text me when new shoe stocks come in, because they stock limited numbers of sizes per item, so you’re not wearing the same thing as the rest of Manila. (That’s also part of what makes Adora such a great place to shop for the people you really, really like — everything is premium and exclusive.)

Whether you’re shopping for yourself this holiday season (like I am) or actually shopping for other people, if you’ve been looking for a stress-free experience, this is it. It’s so stress-free that you don’t even need to line up at a cashier, because there are no visible cashiers. You take a seat and relax, maybe stalk some people on Instagram and catch up on the chismis on all your social media platforms, while the sales associate processes your purchase for you and returns with your items. If you’re buying gifts, don’t even bother wrapping them yourself, because the green gift boxes are gorgeous under the tree. (Adora’s trademark black bows can be swapped out for a seasonal green, if you prefer.) And their dedicated gift-wrapping team — beefed up for the holidays — get all your gifts boxed up efficiently, so you don’t need to come back after x number of hours or on the next day. You’re almost immediately good to go.

I may go back to buy that perfume I loved, as a gift to myself this Christmas. (I’m not telling you what it is.) I’m going to get it wrapped up in that lovely green box, put it under my tree, and open it on the morning of the 25th, because that’s the kind of luxury I — and you — deserve.