Scent

Crowning glories: Art for a confident few Wouldn't it be swell to be queen for a day? Now you can be the queen of kitsch for a day or even a year by wearing your very own head-art crown, cap or headband ornamented with doll parts, paste jewels, shards of Mylar pompons, Christmas decorations, pipe cleaners, pinwheels and whatever else strikes Federal Hill artist Linnie Greene's fancy. Head art is not for the timid. "They're for people who love to enjoy life and have a good time," Greene explains as she tries on a headband decorated with a semi-naked doll swathed in a feathery hula skirt.

Following my nose; essayI never paid much mind to the marketing geniuses who feel products constantly need to be "New and Improved." But when I reached for my beloved Palmolive bar and saw New Fresh Scent! plastered across the new, fresh logo, I recoiled in horror. The bland green bar with its somewhat earthy scent had for years been my soapy version of the Proustian madeleine.For it was the humble Palmolive found in the soap dishes of my collegiate European travels: in bed and breakfasts, villas, my small flat in England.

Q: All I see for spring and summer are short cropped sweaters, many with the midriff showing. But I have a long waist so these sweaters just ride up my back and make me extremely uncomfortable. Have designers completely forgotten about women with figure problems?A: Not according to designer Randy Kemper. He says that with so many short sweaters around, long ones look new for summer:"Short-sleeve sweaters at hip length look great over both narrow and straight skirts. Wear a narrow belt in patent to accent the look, and you'll be right in step with fashion."

New face in the crowd: The American edition of Marie Claire, the popular French magazine, premieres for September/October.Is there room for yet another fash mag on the stands? Yes and no. Competition for the stylish reader keeps editors jumping and job hopping, and that tends to keep content fresh and interesting. Hearst Magazines, which had great success in resurrecting the moribund Harpers Bazaar, is targeting Marie Claire at the broader audience.It's more hot than haute with generous helpings of location photos, fashion hints and plenty of sex -- "Adultery do's and dont's," "Men.

Black and white is hot all over this spring. Store displays are all sporting such combos as white pants and short black jackets, bold black and white print dresses, florals, ginghams and stripes all done up in darks and lights. Black and white looks classic and pretty. Always. Don't fall into the trap of wearing a white shirt with a black bottom -- lest you look like a server. And there's no reason that your black and white has to be tailored either. We've seen some floaty numbers, such as this dress by Emma James ($79)

After 25 Preaknesses, Annette Thomas has her routine, and recipes, down pat. Thirty pounds of ribs, both pork and beef, marinated overnight in vinegar and soy sauce, then grilled in front of her house on Saturday. Fifty pounds of red-skin potatoes — "Never russets, oh no, no, no!" — boiled in her crab pots for dill whipped potato salad. "Half-and-half," or homemade sweet tea — not the bought tea, she explains — and lemonade to wash it down. For the hungry hordes heading into or out of Pimlico Race Course , sidewalk chefs like Thomas serve up a home-cooked alternative to the concessions inside.

Dr. Michael Ain stands 4 feet 3. It's the first thing you notice. There's no way around it. He rolls his green surgical pants around the ankles. He climbs a step-stool to reach the operating table. Even then, his colleagues stand a foot or so above him.He's an orthopedic surgeon, a specialty usually reserved for the jocks of medicine. Ain doesn't exactly fit the stereotype, but he did wrestle in high school, and now he golfs on weekends and fixes bones with big power tools that could tear down walls.

AFTER four months of steady stories, we still have no idea whether Whitewater is cancer or hemorrhoids.Either way, the dynamics of the press coverage are perfectly predictable. Regardless of the scale of wrongdoing, the arc of scandal moves from frenzy to boredom and back again.The media child naps, stirs, races around the room, loses attention, rests, then wakes in full cry. You can almost set your watch by it. The pattern goes like this:First comes the journalistic prophet, in this case Jeff Gerth of the New York Times, who in March 1992 broke the story of the Whitewater investment and the Clintons' connection to the owner of a failed savings and loan.

On the wave of unwanted publicity over unruly youths downtown, owners of businesses around the Inner Harbor were probably none too thrilled to have the smell of dead fish wafting through the air last weekend. Naturally, they brushed it off as having no impact on tourism - but you can bet that the odor was about as welcome as another Pat McDonough press conference. The likely culprit was mahogany tide, an algae that feeds on excess nutrients. This creates huge blooms that eventually die, rot and suck the oxygen out of the water, leaving other forms of aquatic life to suffocate.

HAVE YOU EVER walked past someone who had on the wrong perfume for the season? On a hot summer day you said to yourself, "It's too warm out here for her to have on such a strong scent!" Well, if you haven't, maybe that someone is you. The age-old rule, "A stronger fragrance in the winter and a lighter fragrance in the summer," still applies today. Thankfully, fragrance makers have kept the "cool rule" in mind when releasing new summertime scents. Givenchy, a fixture in the fragrance world, has just launched a new summer scent, Very Irresistible, which the company says has an icy and frosty effect, made possible by a clever combination of notes and new technology.