We rarely think of scent as part of archives and historical records. The past is treated as visual, textual, factual — something we read or look at. But our lives are full of smells: the minty tang of toothpaste, burnt toast, the brine of sweat on public transportation, the coolness of a florist shop we pass on the way to work. These are not incidental. They are the scaffolding of memory. What we forget with our minds, the nose remembers.
I think often about this partial amnesia. What has been lost because it couldn’t be catalogued? How many women’s lives, marked by the scent of boiled milk, starch, soap, lily of the valley, have slipped away without trace? How many communities vanished, taking with them their voices, customs, foods — and scents. In Ukraine, I witnessed towns being flattened, homes scorched, and with them the quiet archives of everyday life. And elsewhere too, in places like Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, wars and displacements continue to erase not only histories but atmospheres, the very breath of places.
Scent survives in fragments. I’m attuned to such details, and I always jot them down when I work with archives or conduct field research. My background in perfumery has shaped not only how I formulate fragrances, but how I write and remember. In letters I’ve found: please buy me a bottle of Coty Jasmin de Corse. In memoirs: our house smelled like stale chocolate and lavender. In cargo manifests: rose attar, civet, ambergris. In recipe books, oil-stained and half-erased: cook the onions till they smell… wrote my great-grandmother Olena. I couldn’t read the last word, but I guessed she meant “sweet.”
Scent appears too in the ruins of war. In Ukraine, I’ve traced it during my travels and research — in Kharkiv, in Odesa, in the eastern frontier towns. There is the pungent rot of exposed insulation left too long under the elements. The rough odor of rusted metal. Burnt rubber. Burnt books. Some smells I’d rather not recall, but I can’t erase them from memory. They remain, long after the image fades.
Some archives are beginning to recover what scent meant. The Osmothèque in Versailles preserves extinct perfumes like fossils of lost eras. Artists now walk cities creating scent maps. I’ve done this myself, creating olfactory fieldnotes as part of The Rose and the Flame, my current writing project about beauty, memory, and survival. The nose gathers what the camera cannot: burned paper, wet lilac, rain on pavement, freshly baked bread in a city under siege.
To include scent in the archive is to say: the body is a witness. History is not only what we write down, but what we breathe in. It’s the sandalwood paste rubbed into an Indian bride’s skin. The salty sweetness inside a cheese shop in Bologna. The comforting warmth of a bread stand in a Poltava market. The scent of frankincense and cigarettes trailing behind a Bektashi baba in Gjirokastër. The metallic burn of blood and antiseptic in a wartime hospital. The perfume my grandmother wore the day she left for the hospital and never came back.
Scent is unruly. It doesn’t fit neatly in a box. But neither does grief. Or love. Or time.
Still, I follow it — not to trap it, but to remember the past in all of its tragic and glorious detail.
If you could preserve one smell from your life, what would it be?
Photography by Bois de Jasmin, Bereh, Ukraine.
28 Comments
Elizabeth J: My mother’s cigarette stubs in her amber glass ash tray shaped like a bunch of grapes. Viceroys and stained with her rose-red lipstick. August 1, 2025 at 9:35am
Victoria: That image is so vivid, the amber grapes, the Viceroys, the rose-red lipstick. A whole world in one ashtray. Thank you for this memory. August 4, 2025 at 10:28am
Elizabeth J: Thank you, Victoria. Working on a haiku because the bones are there.
Love your blog and sensitivity. Take care and stay well. August 4, 2025 at 11:57am
Alityke: The riding school. Getting off the bus & catching the acrid sharpness of horse urine on straw, the sweet straw & horse muck rotting down on the muck heap. The delicious vanilla/tonka/grassy fug of the hay barn, the bready, metallic, oily tang of the oats & barley cooking in the copper over a sweet wood fire. The tack room, soapy, leather, antiseptic whiff from the neatsfoot oil. Then finally, the delicious muskiness of healthy horses & ponies. From their coumarinic breath, soft whiskery peltish musk of their noses & the comfort of leaning against them, feeling the muscles, strong enough to kill but gentled by the comfort your hug brings them too.
I can conjour this smellarama in my head to bring me peace in times of stress. August 1, 2025 at 10:04am
Victoria: What a symphony of smells, so layered, textured, alive. You transported me. “Smellarama” is now my new favorite word. August 4, 2025 at 10:28am
Vishishta: The amazing sea salt breeze when the car comes within orb of the Pacific Ocean on a very hot day.
My mother’s sweet “White Shoulders”. The babies smell in infancy. August 1, 2025 at 11:16am
Victoria: White Shoulders and sea breeze, salt and sweetness. A whole sensory world in just a few lines. August 4, 2025 at 10:28am
Julie F: The smell of rain on a hot, oyster shell-paved road. A smell from early childhood summers. I’ve caught a whiff of it in some synthetic musks, but don’t know enough to recognize which musk is being used. August 1, 2025 at 12:19pm
Victoria: The smell of rain on oyster shell, what a beautiful and precise memory. I’ll now be chasing that scent in every musk I meet. August 4, 2025 at 10:29am
Hamamelis: Beautiful writing and how good to read about your new project.
The scent of Hamamelis (witchhazel) on a winter’s day. Tangerine, orange, honeysuckle and watermelon all at once, and there is still more hidden, like overtones in music, they are present but not always detectable, but without them the music loses some of its richness.
Dog’s paws. August 1, 2025 at 1:02pm
Alityke: Dog paws smell delicious despite what they walk on & in! August 2, 2025 at 3:03am
Victoria: Exactly! Somehow they always smell like popcorn and sunshine, no matter what mischief they’ve been in. August 4, 2025 at 10:29am
Victoria: Thank you so much. Your description of witchhazel is like a poem in itself. August 4, 2025 at 10:29am
Teddee Grace: Wet oak leaves. My paternal grandparents had a swing in their backyard hanging from a strong oak limb. My sister and I played there often. Years later I was in a park in a neighboring state researching WPA projects undertaken during the Roosevelt administration and was overwhelmed by this wonderful and nostalgic aroma. August 1, 2025 at 2:42pm
Victoria: What a powerful memory. History and childhood woven together through scent. August 4, 2025 at 10:30am
Madelyn E: I treasure many scents but my favorites are freshly cut green grass and sweet honeysuckle bushes. Summertime smells like these are showcased against the backdrop of bright sunlight and are reminiscent of my camp days.
Additionally, the inviting aroma of hot bread and brownies from the oven are pleasantly imprinted in my memory. August 1, 2025 at 11:14pm
Victoria: Camp days, honeysuckle, and oven-warm brownies—your memory reads like summer bottled. Thank you for sharing it. August 4, 2025 at 10:30am
Aurora: I’m loving your series of articles.
In France, the smell of the forest every Sunday with my parents and brother, especially when it was lily of the valley season. My neighborhood in the UK in summer after the rain. August 2, 2025 at 4:45am
Victoria: Thank you, Aurora! Lily of the valley season in the forest sounds like a dream. And yes, rain after heat always carries magic. August 4, 2025 at 10:30am
Kathy: My foundational scent memory is the smell of gardenia bushes in full bloom, coming in with the cool morning air through the window of my childhood bedroom in the Southern US. Thank you for your beautiful essay, Victoria. August 2, 2025 at 7:12am
Victoria: That’s such a tender and fragrant memory. I can almost feel that morning breeze. Thank you for your kind words. August 4, 2025 at 10:30am
Toni: Victoria,
Your inspirational essay highlights
the rewards of awareness.
Gardenia is also my favorite flower.
My father gave me a gardenia corsage at graduation and my mother gave me a small bush for our new home. I planted more gardenias, but when she passed away, her plant was the only one blooming.
Beautiful memories. August 2, 2025 at 7:38pm
Victoria: So moving, Toni. The blooming gardenia at just that moment… thank you for sharing such a deeply personal story. August 4, 2025 at 10:31am
Michele Brown: Victoria:My memory of smells is of fat peaches hanging on acres of peach trees in my Uncles Peach farm in South Carolina, USA, ready for picking. The warm, sweet breath of the momma Cat’s little wiggly, soooo soft kittens in the hay loft of the barn where the mule lived. My Aunt’s pantry where the Bens of flour, sugar and rice were kept. Rice is the mashed potatoes of the south. No one is eating mashed potatoes with fried chicken. Only rice and milky, flour gravy made from the bits left from frying the chicken. The fresh smell of bed sheets hung to dry in warm sunshine as we fell into bed exhausted from playing in the creek that ran through the cow pasture. We ate fresh figs off my aunts fig tree, pomegranates, and fresh tomatoes from the kitchen garden with leftover breakfast biscuits. Also, the big, white Victorian farm house with the covered porch that ran half way round the house with its hanging swing. We played there, as well, when it rained. I’ve always wanted to reconstruct that house with its 14’ ceilings and walnut Alas, we are not millionaires. Plus, being in our elder yrs, well, it just wouldn’t be the same. Sorry, but I can’t have just one favorite memory. 🌺 August 2, 2025 at 10:36pm
Victoria: Michele, this is a whole novel of scent and memory. I was right there with you. Thank you for this beautiful, generous tapestry. August 4, 2025 at 10:31am
Michele Brown: Victoria: sorry I left out staircase in my description. 🤭 August 2, 2025 at 10:40pm
Victoria: And I loved the staircase detail! August 4, 2025 at 10:31am
Klaas: I love this community!
I’m going to je boring, but the one smell that I would love to archive is – here I go again! – the very particular smell of the Paris subway. I lived in Paris in my early twenties and it was one of the most exciting, defining and just simply fantastic period of my life. Nothing epitomizes these years more that the smell of the subway. It’s not a pleasant smell at all; rather pungent, a bit sweet, rubbery, burnt, sweaty and animatic. But it immediately transports me back to the early 90’s, and that vertiginous thrill of being young, independant, holding the world in the palm of one’s hand and taking big, hungry bites……. August 6, 2025 at 5:59am