Ode de Parfum
My mother has a very large collection of scarves, so her drawers are a technicolour mass of fabric and I believe that if all her scarves were sewn together, we’d be able to create a large kaleidoscopic tent. Every so often, I engage in the sacred mother daughter ritual of borrowing a stunning sliver of printed cloth from her menagerie of prints. It is not the feel of her fine quality scarves that make me incandescently happy, but rather her scent within the scarves. The sweet smell of my mum mixed with Van Cleef or no 5 pulls me into a sweet reverie. I feel like I’m wearing a hug, and I bask in the instantaneous comfort that comes with her familiar scents.
This same sense of the familiar and of home clung to me when I was younger after hugging my mum goodbye when being dropped off at school. For the better half of my school mornings, my mum was with me, clinging to the collar of my school uniform. The power of scent on the memory is extraordinary; the whiff of something can send you right back to a particular place, person or feeling. And every scarf takes me to her room, with all her lovely smelling lotions and potions positioned on her dressing table and the silver tray of all her perfumes standing in a cluster of alchemy.
My first bottle of perfume was Papillion by Oillily, bought for me by none other than my mum on one of her trips to China. I felt so grown up, having my very own little bottle of fragrance, layered in colourful, printed butterflies. On my dressing table sat this iridescent emblem of womanhood and the woman I wanted to be one day. Perfume has since become like a drug to me, and I can’t help but get high off the nostalgia a good scent triggers. Instead of making deals with nefarious drug lords in dimly lit alley-ways, shimmering perfumeries guarded by equally shimmering women are where these delicious chemistries are procured.
The sweet smell of Stella by Stella McCartney takes me to the little English corner of Canterbury. A misting on my wrists and all of a sudden I’m on exchange again. ‘m caught in a whirlwind of English adventures: eating fish and chips on the bumpy pebble beaches of Whitstable, crammed parties in our tiny student kitchens, brisk morning walks, and trespassing to pet cows in the countryside all float to memory. Every time I feel sad or when time has rendered me disconnected to those five months of my life, I inhale the bottle, wishing with all my might that it could somehow take me back in time to those moments. In its own way it does.
I once even tried to create my own signature scent. When I was sixteen years old and on a French Tour with my school, our group of twenty excitable, giggling tourists got a tour of the famous perfume manufacturer, Fragonard. At the end of the tour, after watching people in impressive white coats turn palp into perfume, we were given the opportunity to create a small bottle of our own fragrance using the scent of that year: l’orange. In a failed attempt at making a unique not-too-sweet, not-too-spicy fragrance, I created a nauseating scent that smelt like the lovechild of an off chocolate orange and a cinnamon stick. I still have the small unused bottle of the repugnant concoction and once I’ve stomached the nausea from sniffing it, I have a hankering for croissants and stealing small packets of Nutella from French hotels.
I still bury my face in my mum’s scarves whenever I hug her and my collection of bottles of memory liquid travel with me wherever I go. Papillon turned into Chloe and Kenzo, and the familiarity of home and its silver trays of perfume were replaced with university, uncertainty, the exhilaration of youth, cheap wine and the accompanying more mature scents of Mcartney and Marc, and the musky smell of runaway boys. My aromatic journey will continue and my own collection of nice smelling scarves will expand, and with it my collection of perfume, redolent of a past of collected stories and hinting at those to come.
All photos taken by me,