Blooming in my office today and, with it’s “shocking pink” color and fabulous fragrance, making work all that much more pleasant.

Epiphyllum

Shocking pink was fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s (1890- 19730) signature color and she described it as “life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West.”

Marcel Vertes 1940 watercolor ad for Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume, which shows a bottle of Shocking  reclining in a pink hammock with a floating couple above and Cupid below.

Marcel Vertes and Elsa Schiaparelli jointly won the British Academy Film award in 1952 for Best Costume Design for the original Moulin Rouge film, about the life and times of artist Toulouse-Lautrec.