I Smell
A perfumed self portrait
There is no perfume that I’m named after. I’ve met girls named after Anaïs, Anaïs and Chloé and I’m sure there that there are some women my age who bear the names Charlie and Shalimar after those iconic fragrances. However, there is one special fragrance that comes close. It is also the catylyst for my passion for smelling. It’s a fragrance called Jean Naté. When I was a little girl, my mother had an enormous bottle of this drugstore classic perched over the side of our bathtub. This giant cylinder of yellow plastic had “Jean Naté” splashed in kicky black script, and a shiny black bulbous screw top. My family moved around a lot, and no matter where we moved, the giant Jean Naté bottle moved with us. I don’t know how many times I saw the TV commercial for Jean Naté body splash, but it made a very deep impression on me.
One day, when I was about seven or eight, I tiptoed into the bathroom, locked the door and stripped off my clothes. Naked, standing in the tub, I unscrewed the top of the big yellow container. The bottle was heavy because I remember the great effort it took to lift it up so that I could perform the ritual I had admired for so long in the commercial. I was a person ‘who wanted to take charge of her life!’ With a heave, I flung the bottle up and then towards my little body, splashing Jean Naté against my skin in my best imitation of the commercial. Over half of the enormous bottle spilled onto me, the bathtub and the bathroom floor. A great fog of perfume then permeated the room. To my dismay, I didn’t feel energized or elated. The cologne was icy fresh in that sharp, synthetic 70s way, with acetone and chemical citrus esters heavy in the mix. The splash gave me a very cold sensation all over. I remember being first confused, then disappointed. How I had longed to feel what the beautiful, daring TV lady felt.
Suddenly, the fear set in. I scrambled around the slippery tub and tiles in a vain attempt to clean up the mess. Cheap cologne was harder to hide than my other disastrous experiments. That odor left criminal olfactive prints for hours, and in fact, days. My mother did investigate the mystery, though I think she found it more funny than naughty. It was punishment enough for me to reek for days. Thank god I never managed to get my hands on a bottle of City Girl, “shimmering perfume”
— another cheap cologne with glitter in it, and an ad that gave me the thrill of sexy city living decades before Carrie Bradshaw entered prime time.
And that’s how my love of smelling began.
Scents I was drawn to from ages 7-10 or so were floral in the extreme. Favorites from my mother’s collection were YSL’s Rive Gauche, Halston and the quintessentially 80s Giorgio. I never wore them because they were scents I simply could not identify with. I was both tomboy and romantic slip of a girl, running through fields of flowers, rolling around in their intoxicating perfume to absorb and be empowered by their magical essence. I adored Lily of the Valley, which came in a generic-looking bottle with Muguet printed on it (French translation of the flower). I decided to give it an edge by rebottling it in a wax animal lion statuette from the zoo, which ended up leaking the precious fluid all over my dresser. Yet another mystery for my mother.
For Christmas one year, I was given a set of tiny luxury perfume samples. My favorite was Joy by Jean Patou. It had a fancy-looking cut glass flacon, and I had read somewhere that this fragrance contained zillions of real flowers.
The idea that that all of these flowers had to be harvested, their essence extracted and squeezed into this small flacon amplified my passion for it. I was anointing myself with a sacred potion. This was unsurprisingly also the age of my obsession with Maid Marian and long, lacy dresses. When wearing perfume, I was transformed. My dreams of being a far-away princess were realized in this very adult practice.
My young nose may have been one-dimensional, but its curiosity was insatiable. Moving into teenage years, I expanded to slightly more complicated accords: sunny florals with citrus and green notes full of cut grass, jasmine, lilies and tuberose. This was the era of Benetton’s Colors de Benetton, Liz Claiborne, and of course, the scent that best captures my preteen persona, Lauren, by Ralph Lauren.
That gorgeous, elegant burgundy glass cube with its dainty gold cap and regal script made me feel classy in an English-countryside-aristocratic kind of way. Ages 11-14 was precisely when I began to pay attention to my appearance, when I began to accessorize, wear purses and scarves in a very self-conscious way.
This was also the time when I had crushes on boys from exotic places, like my neighbor Jonathan from Argentina whose mother was thin and gorgeous and always smelled of Bain de Soleil Orange Gelée. I went from a fairy-tale princess to Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. My idol was Cybill Shepherd’s Moonlighting character, Maddie, with her crisp, unpretentious charm.
I desperately wanted to be taken seriously. But by whom? I have no clue.
In high school, I adored the dreamy romance of Merchant Ivory films but I was moving with the gender-bending times, borrowing my sister’s Eternity from time to time. My style was becoming more unisex. I frequently wore floral print dresses with steel-toed Doc Martens or jeans with a tee-shirt pared with my dad’s pinstriped suit vest. At some point, however, I discovered Angel by Thierry Mugler.
This perfume was unlike anything I had ever smelled before. It was powerful but inviting, sweet but not cloying and had no floral note whatsoever.
It was everything I wanted to be at that time: exciting, unusual, French, beautiful, warm and irresistible. It was, I imagined, like honey is to bears. I’ll never forget that flamboyant, shooting star-shaped bottle. As I transitioned from adolescence to adulthood, my wearing perfume became strategic. I was becoming aware of how others (boys) responded to my scent rather than just me or my family — poor things who were subjected to my unwittingly heavy application.
Then there was my budding francophilia. Liking perfume, fine food and scarves, you might say, predisposed me to an affinity for Frenchness. My first trip to France was in my senior year. In an unremarkable Parisian suburb, I met a neighbor who wore a very strong and attractive aftershave. And though this guy was not particularly cute, his smell was thrilling. Every single day of those two weeks I looked forward to our morning encounters at the bus stop, waiting for the precious moment of the bises when I could smell him. I would close my eyes, drink in the cold March air and the overpowering clean herbal odor of Roger and Gallet Vetyver on the boy’s warm, freshly shaven cheek.
Although Angel was the cult fragrance of my late teens and early twenties, the flirty, floral ghosts of my childhood haunted me during trips to Paris breezing along the skin and hair of stylish women encountered in trains and buses. Trésor was a lovely grown-up version of my beloved Lauren; its chic crispness was attenuated by honeysuckle and hazelnut. I couldn’t help loving the insouciant YSL Paris, definitely the teenage daughter of Rive Gauche and evocative of a girl at the top of her class but who skips classes to flirt with older men in cafés. I had a secret fondness for Lou Lou, a softer, gentler cousin to the femme fatale that was Angel. Sometimes I attempted to hunt down these bewitching odors in perfume shops or pharmacies, though I was still a shy scent detective.
Educating My Nose in Paris
It was only when I returned to that is Paris, during my masters study, that my olfactory curiosity was revived. Years of cramming and dating broke musicians dulled my finer senses. Back in the French pleasure capital, I met fellow esoteric sensualists who happily distracted me from dusty basement libraries through the equally important study of art, food, fashion, and scent. The influence of such worldly women expanded my olfactory palate even more. They introduced me to niche perfumes from all over Europe, expensive couture fragrances like Creed, Far Eastern aromas from incense and dishes with yuzu, ginger, and heady scents from South America and the Caribbean, such as passionflower, coconut, and rum. Thus was born my exotic fruity floral phase. For years after my sensual Paris sabbatical, I made it through frigid Chicago winters by scenting myself as though I were basking in the sun.
No wonder I moved to California for grad school. There, tropical fragrances made cultural sense and took over my daily toilette. Comptoir Sud Pacifique became my new favorite brand in the long days of sunshine in Berkeley, also the waning days of my own precious youth (I was almost 30). I exhausted Les Enfants du Soleil, an appropriately named summer fun beach scent. It made me feel like an innocent, sexy teen, born and raised on surfboards and ice cream. I felt light and liberated the way I did when I went blond. Its flowery coconut milk notes sent me to a carefree, sing-songy place in my soul.
Somewhere near the end of this sunshine trip, I decided to apply some rigor to my perfume research. I started to seek out perfume boutiques specialized in wide variety and exclusivity. I became interested in everything unusual and extraordinary, paying attention to perfumers and ingredients. I fell hard for one of the most unique perfumes I had encountered since Angel, Comme des Garçons’ Rhubarb.
Through Comme des Garçons, I discovered concept perfumes. It was a perfect new hobby for my lusty, capricious nose in times of intense bodily denial as a graduate student. This perfume doesn’t actually smell like rhubarb the plant or rhubarb pie. It is like rhubarb cooking in butter, just at the initial sauté point, on a stove inside of a wood cabin in the springtime. All Comme des Garçons fragrances are exciting if not always something I would want to wear.
I am very fortunate to have found in the man who is now my husband a partner in scent adventure. He was the first of my boyfriends to take a sincere, artistic interest in how I smelled, and in fragrances themselves. Our noses have journeyed together over the years, and we dabble in sharing perfumes, like Comme des Garçons’ Kyoto, a very masculine fragrance to most people. I feel strong and stealthy when I wear it, like an assassin. I imagine whoever smells it on me disturbed by its smoky power yet secretly intrigued by that discomfort.
More than ever, I see fragrance as an art form. I appreciate niche perfumers cropping up every year, and uncompromising brands such as Byredo, and Frédéric Malle. It is a very exciting time to smell, and not just perfume but olfactory art. Consider Visionaire’s Scent artbook of photos with corresponding customized scents, CB I Hate Perfume, provocative installations by Sissel Tolaas and other emerging scent artists.
While I now take perfume more seriously than ever, my attitude is paradoxically more playful than ever. From my early hedonistic abandon to my strategic, artistic exploration, I have come full circle. Now I understand the totality of olfactory experience. Scent has transcended consumption to become an art form unto itself. But whether intellectual or sensual, smelling is essentially about pleasure and play. My nose translates odor layers, environments, and climates into moods and sensations that stretch my imagination and delight my senses.
I smell therefore I am.
If you enjoyed this piece, please ‘recommend’ it with a quick click on the green button below.
