In Your Opinion: 314 posts

Scent Diary is a place where we can share fragrances we encounter, good and bad, perfumes we wear and environmental scents. It’s a way to sharpen our sense of smell, but also just to enjoy our fragrance hobby in a different way.

Whether you write down 1 recollection or 10 matters less than simply reminding yourself to smell. You can add as many comments as you wish. You can comment today or over the course of the week; this thread will always be open. Of course, do share what perfume you’re wearing or what particularly good scented products you’ve discovered.

My week turned out to be extremely busy, so the next review will most likely be up on Monday, June 16th. Meanwhile, I look forward to reading your scent diaries and sharing my own. Collecting scents as I go about my day is my way to slow down (and it’s a lot of fun!)

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

Today we have our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread. Bois de Jasmin will return with its regular schedule on Tuesday, June 3rd. You can use this space to ask any questions about perfume, including fragrance recommendations.

How does it work:

1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know how your search goes and what you end up sampling.

2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

In Workout for the Nose : How to Improve Your Sense of Smell I outlined several exercises that will improve your sense of smell. They are guaranteed to give results if you devote at least some time to smelling consciously. But  as I’ve found in my own training, the best results come from doing these exercises with someone else. Not only do you get more motivated to follow through, but you also learn from the observations of others.

So, let’s devote this week to the most basic–and the most effective–smelling exercise. It involves noting the scents you encounter in your day-to-day life and writing them down at the end of each day this week. We can then comment on each other’s fragrant experiences, share our own, and learn to use our noses more often.

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Can poor eyesight be compensated by a sharp sense of smell? Our guest writer Jillie shares her story of struggling with poor vision and falling in love with perfume.

Sometimes I believe that when I was born the Bad Fairy cursed me with bad sight, while the Good Fairy gave me a keen nose. I know that it sounds fanciful, but I am convinced that my poor vision is compensated for by a sharp sense of smell. Perhaps, if I hadn’t suffered with severe myopia, I may never have developed into the scent obsessive that I am now.

I was nine when I realized that I couldn’t see as well as other children, but by then my nose had already been working as hard as Samantha’s in Bewitched. As a toddler, it would lead me around the garden and I would plunge into banks of honey-scented alyssum, drifts of lavender and into the lush red roses climbing up the wall.

Good smells were usually associated with food in my early years , especially my mum’s apple and blackberry pie and my dad’s roast dinners. Christmas would be a feast of aromas: the sunny citrus tang of tangerine peel (a fruit we only saw in the holiday season), the creaminess of chocolate buttons, the licorice darkness of the Christmas pudding, the delicate bitterness of marzipan, the vanilla sweetness of my grand-dad’s pipe tobacco and the boozy tang of port and whisky, which were only ever drunk on special occasions. Add a note of fir tree, and you have my ultimate festive perfume. (I’ll skip the ever present funk of cigarette smoke, one of my least favorite smells.)

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Today we have our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread. You can use this space to ask any questions about perfume, including fragrance recommendations.

How does it work:

1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know how your search goes and what you end up sampling.

2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin: Spring in Brussels