My Scent Trail

Help me find a new perfume!

It was the softest leather. The kind that has been buffed (what do they do to leather to make it soft?) so that no pores or wrinkles remain. And it was diffused with Musk by Alyssa Ashley. The combination of the wild leather and something mysterious and warm and kind. This was what my mother smelled like when she would greet me after coming home from work in the evenings. In the winter she wore fox fur around her neck and it somehow acted like a diffuser of the scent. It was a wonderful and warm scent!

It was called Date, and it was the deodorant of choice for all Nordic tweens and young teens. Locker rooms turned into a demonstration of aerosols and synthetic chemicals which masked the persistent and immovable smell of old sweat and unaired spaces. I searched and searched for a picture of the one I used. I think it’s this one. I always judge(d) a book by its cover, and this lady looked exactly the way I wanted to look. Actually, I still kind of want to look like her! She’s cool, isn’t she?

Tresor was the only perfume I ever got a compliment for wearing. The moment I smelled it I knew this was me. Or rather, the me my high school persona wanted to be. Someone in the movies. Someone elegant and pretty. Someone extremely sophisticated! It had just come out and I knew I was one of the first to wear it in my town. Of course I sprayed way too much and became a cloud of esters and fragrance alcohols. Thinking back on it I feel sorry for friends and teachers who had to work in a perfume shop (classroom) all day long. I wasn’t the only one over-spraying her/himself in perfumes, but perhaps one of the most fragrant ones. It was intoxicatingly good stuff for a high schooler.

So many memories are bunched up in Tresor that I cannot bare to sniff it nowadays. It causes some severe cringe-worthy memories. It was good when it was good and I wore it down to the ground, and eventually it was time to bury it with those memories. It smelled the best on a freezing Finnish winter night when the mood and the moon were bright and young and stars sparkled in the sky! Let’s leave it at that…

Then an awkward stage. Perhaps it is what unhappiness smells like? I, and it seems like a gazillion other twenty-somethings, found CK One. I never liked it. It was — an anti-perfume? Why did I wear it? Why did I do things I didn’t enjoy? My best guess is that I chose this perfume because it was the polar opposite of everything else I smelled around me. Around me I smelled floral and lovely perfumes that did not smell like me, and I hated that. CK One had just come out on the market and I thought what the heck. There were a lot of what the hecks back then, and this one was a “What the heck did I think”! Hey kids, don’t buy CK One. Like, ever.

Then on to life in California. Sunshine, intensive light, and sometimes overwhelmingly warm temperatures. Warmer climates demand a special kind of scent, at least for me. I can’t handle suffocating and heavy perfumes in the Mediterranean climates (or desert or tropics for that matter.) They are lovely in cold settings, but heat demands something else.

My first full blown hit was Fresh’s Fig Apricot. Found it at Anthropologie on a sale shelf. It was and is perfect. Fig is the magic ingredient to me. But it is too powerful on its own so it must be tempered by something. Diluted.

Early in my American life I quickly discovered the allure of intoxicatingly beautiful and expensive scented candles. This was the gateway to Jo Malone. I was visiting a friend and in the bathroom stood a burning scented candle by Jo Malone. It was Fig Cassis. This changed my life forever (as they would say in corny interviews.)

What I haven’t told you yet is that out of all my senses, my sense of smell is possibly one of the most acute. I remember smells like others remember, well, memories of events. I can’t remember names or years, but I remember what it smelled like in almost every house or cottage I visited in my childhood. A fragment of a smell can send me back to my childhood, or my life in Arizona, or a night out in my youth. One night, while driving through the Beverly Hills golf course it smelled like Finnish summer rain and I broke out in tears. Yup. It’s all in there, in the scent center.

Jo Malone was esthetically the most beautiful scent I had ever encountered in my entire life up until then. I had to have it. I breathed in as much as possible of this scented candle and memorized it. Then I went home and looked up the perfume version. And realized I couldn’t afford it. Damn!

Fresh’s Fig Apricot was a place holder until I could get hold of Jo Malone’s Fig Cassis. Both of these scents eventually went off market, and I was forced to find a new scent.

It was on a sunrise hike in the Santa Monica Mountains that I caught a whiff of something. Could it be? Could it be something figgy? I leaned in across a dried up bush and sniffed in. Deep sniffs. A lady happened to walk by and I explained what I was doing. She smiled and understood! And she pointed me to my next perfumed pit stop: Jo Malone Wood Sage & Sea Salt.

I had leaned across sage brush and the sage oils mixed with the salty air from the Pacific, high above the Santa Monica basin, and it was beautiful. Jo Malone’s Wood Sage & Sea Salt imitated this exact scent! And it was… fair to good. It carried me through while I searched for my scent.

I would instantly recognize my new scent when it appeared. That is how I operate. There is no chart or map to my perfume. It comes to me when I smell it. I’ve never drifted with the popular brands, and I wonder, perhaps I should try Chanel or Tom Ford or Gucci? Actually I have Gucci’s Bloom (gifted to me by a kind person) and sadly I hate it. I gives me allergies and an irritated mind. Perfumes must give you a sense of joy and revive your spirits!

Then, a period of rest from all perfumes. I had a big surgery and was under tremendous stress from all angles of life. I stopped using all perfumes. This has not happened before or after in my life. This perfume-fast lasted about two years.

When I came out of the scent-free tunnel I discovered Maison Marie Louis and their Bois de Balincourt. It was tucked away in the furthest corner of the Sephora perfume shelf, way way away from all the fancy and screaming-for-attention bottles. This is what I look for. Something hidden, something less known. I want something that reminds me of a mossy forest, perhaps a bit of Linnea borealis, and fresh rain and sage and vivid nature!

Bois de Balincourt was almost that. I was infatuated, at least a little. I cycled through the sister-perfumes of it and never really felt fully at home. Something was amiss. Most likely it was me. The perfume was right but I suspect I wasn’t in the right space for it.

And now we’re in present time. I am drifting. I can’t find a perfume I love. I’m bobbing around in the sea looking for a mermaid’s cliff to grasp on to — a barnacled cliff in the Ocean of Perfumes that smells heavenly.

I must find my perfume again. It is important. Can you help me? You know my scent trail. You know my stories. But what do they smell like?

What scents do you love (or hate)? Why?

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