Talk About the Passion: Smell
I love fragrance. Here's why, and here are some perfumes and eau de colognes you might love too.
I went from someone completely unbothered by perfumes and fragrances to someone who once suffered a disaster when they picked up the wrong bottle and wore a fragrance they hadn't intended to when they went for a job interview. I didn't get the job and I'm still convinced it's because I wasn't wearing my favourite fragrance.
How did that happen? What are my favourite fragrances? Why are smells so good at evoking memory and triggering emotions? And why is it so hard to write about smell?
In this — which I hope will be the first of many deep dives into my passions, and possibly the passions of other people (if I can persuade anyone to write about them) — I'm going to talk about just that. Stay tuned, at the end I’ll give the lowdown on a handful of perfumes and fragrances, for all genders, that I'll guarantee will make you feel amazing and have people complimenting you everywhere you go.
Talk About the Passion: Fragrance
I was never one for perfumes, aftershaves, eau de colognes, or the rest. It’s not that I was ever a skank — I’ve always used deodorant and shower as much as the next person — it’s just that I was never particularly interested in wearing fragrance.
I grew up in the seventies. Fragrances were something that you received as a Christmas gift or, less often, for your birthday. I vividly remember my biological father buying my mum bottles of Poison, a Dior perfume which is still available now. A huge, confident, ballsy perfume (or that’s how I remember it, anyway), it was definitely not one to be worn day-to-day.
Not that any perfume was, back then. Perfumes were strictly a special occasion thing. My mum would have worn Poison when she went out out. To a restaurant maybe (a rare occurrence in the seventies, doubly so in my family), or when we went to the local working men’s club with my dad’s brother and his family on a Saturday. There my aunt — also wearing perfume, though not Poison — would sip her Babycham while my mum had her lime and lemon and the two fragrance-free men their lagers (I don’t remember what I or my cousins had. I imagine cokes, or dandelion and burdock, or Vimto, which we would make last for as long as we could). There’d be some form of entertainment. I don’t remember dancing, though there must have been. There was definitely music, occasionally a covers band and more often a DJ. But for the most part, I just remember the two families sitting around a table. Talking, I suppose (my biological father’s side of the family has never been what you’d call chatty, but surely, surely, we didn’t sit there in silence?). Even then I was lost inside my own head, so about what I probably didn’t know then and certainly can’t remember now. There was probably Bingo too, a raffle which we never won, and maybe a Tombola.
I do, however, remember there being a shoot-out, more than once.
There were shoot-outs, too. Yes, seriously. It’s true that I grew up, not the Wild West, but in the West Midlands, but two men would face each other, each with holstered pistols, and each trying to be the first to draw and fire at the other.
Before you get too alarmed, these shoot-outs were planned affairs. The club used to have a regular ‘Country and Western’ night, when I suppose the music was largely of that genre and visitors were encouraged to dress up. Out came the jeans and checked shirts, the bandanas and cowboy hats. I don’t remember dressing up myself (or more accurately, being dressed up by my parents) but it’s possible. If I remember correctly, my uncle had a go, while his brother did not. But either way, some of the attendees would put their names down at the beginning of the evening, and then half-way through the duelling would begin. (Quick-draw, was it called? That rings a bell, now…). They’d face off, each with a pistol loaded with blanks (and where did they get those from? Did they bring their own? Were the provided by the club? That too is lost in the depths of time) and await the signal. I seem to remember that originally there were two balloons, and the man standing nearest the first to burst was declared the winner, though this far from reliable system was replaced by some electronic sensor (I guess triggered by the noise of the shot) that would indicate the winner. Contestants (fighters? Duellers?) would be eliminated one by one, until eventually only two would remain, and following a tense head-to-head, a victor would claim his prize. Probably a week’s worth of meat, or perhaps some cash or drinks vouchers at the bar.
Scent is highly emotive and deeply intertwined with memory
It all seems so strange now. The Working Men’s Club. The shoot-out/quick draw competition. The dandelion and burdock. I’d hope the former have at least been renamed, but for all I know the quick draw competition still takes place. (Does it? If you know, tell all!) But it’s a definite memory, and nothing takes me back there quite like the smell of gunsmoke mixed with cheese and onion crisps and blended with warm lager and babycham and topped off with the mix of whatever my aunt was wearing and Poison by Christian Dior.
Scent is highly emotive (something the perfume industry relies on) and is also deeply intertwined with memory, probably more so than any of the other senses. Freshly baked bread takes me back (there’s a reason that estate agents recommend baking bread before showing your home to prospective buyers) to a childhood innocence. A chlorinated pool takes me back to swimming lessons at Brierley Hill baths. vinegary fish’n’chips to holidays spent in Weymouth.
There’s theory behind this. Scientists have used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging, which looks not at the structure of the brain, but which parts are activated and by how much) and proven a link between fragrance and memory. And they’ve found that it’s episodic memory that’s triggered, which are memories of autobiographical events.
But why is this? Scent is processed by the olfactory bulb, a structure located in the front of the brain. It’s then sent on to the limbic system, which includes the amygdala and the hippocampus, which are the regions that control emotion and memory. So it would seem to be a physical proximity that makes fragrance and smell so evocative of memory and emotion.
It’s perhaps for this reason that — unlike sight and sound — it can be very difficult to write about smells. We have many adjectives to describe what we hear and what we see, but not many that can apply to our sense of taste and smell. And those that we have are fairly pedestrian. Sweet, sour, bitter, pungent etc. But scents are ephemeral and subjective. Something — whether it's a perfume or a naturally occurring smell — that I love, you may find disgusting. And vice versa of course. Fragrances evoke deeply personal associations and memories unique to each individual. Describing them requires a delicate balance of metaphor, and sensory imagery, and we’d do well to describe the emotions and memories they evoke rather than the objective smell itself.
So how did I go from someone unbothered by fragrance to a person who is convinced they failed job interview because they accidentally wore the wrong scent? Like many other things I suppose, the catalyst for my love of fragrance was meeting a friend who filled me with the enthusiasm they already felt. I'd grown up knowing nothing about perfumes. I knew, vaguely, what was available. I saw the adverts, the Hollywood stars cavorting seductively with pumas (or is that a false memory?) and the shirtless guys on billboards. I knew of the fragrances by Calvin Klein, or John Paul Gautier, or Marc Jacobs, etc. In the 90s, everyone was wearing Le Male, and so was I (a fragrance I can barely stand now, for some reason). Or they were wearing CK One, which was marketed as a unisex perfume, quite a radical idea at the time. Basically, I knew the fragrances you could get on the High Street, in Boots the Chemist or the average department store. I knew them, but I rarely wore them, and when I did, it would've only been on special occasions.
But then I met a friend who was passionate about scent. He introduced me to a whole other world of fragrance and perfume. And now — while I wouldn't say I was an expert with an encyclopedic knowledge of which scents were produced when, by whom and contain what (for example) — I have broadened my tastes beyond the High Street. I have quite an extensive collection of fragrances, with certain favourites that I return to again and again.
Here then are some of my favourites. Each is guaranteed to make you feel amazing, and you’ll be fighting off the compliments everywhere you go…