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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In the May column of the Financial Times Magazine, I daydream about cherry blossoms. Titled Perfumes Whose Blossoms Beguile, the article is inspired by my grandmother’s garden in Ukraine. Spring is the most evanescent season; one moment the cherry blossoms are dazzlingly white and lush, and the next they’re wilting on the ground. As I read Gogol while sitting under the trees, brushing falling petals from the pages, and becoming intoxicated with the bittersweet aroma of cherry blossoms, I longed to capture this moment. How else but with perfume? This is how the article took shape.

“All perfumes called Cherry Blossom fall far short of reality. I say this with confidence as I lie on the grass in my grandmother’s cherry garden, gazing up at the blossom-covered branches. The flowers are so white and dense that if I squint, the trees seem to be draped in snow. A gust of wind shakes the petal confetti onto the pages of my book, and after a while I shut my worn volume of The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol and daydream in the pale sunshine. To read the rest, please click here.

Nikolai Gogol was born about 15 miles from our town, and his descriptions of Ukrainian landscapes poignantly remind me of the places I know so well.

What spring scents would you like to capture? Which perfumes have the most spring-like aura to you?

Photography by Bois de Jasmin: under the cherry trees

Raven were her locks, and her hair’s perfume like Ambergris;
Rose-coloured, gold-embroidered, is the raiment that she wears,
Like a light her beauty shineth ; has no one seen her? Tell me, pray.
Favour me, O my good fortune, as thou didst when she came with me,
Show me now the footsteps of my loved one that is lost.

— Khush Hal Khan Ichatak, the 17th century Afghan poet

Since I posted about the Matisse exhibit at Tate Modern in London (17 April – 7 September 2014), I thought I’d share news about another special event–Steve McCurry’s Afghanistan photography at the Beetles + Huxley Gallery, 12 May-7 June. Although most of us associate Afghanistan with grim violence and war, it has some of the most stunning landscapes in the world–craggy ravines, lush green valleys, golden deserts, and remnants of old civilizations. But above all, its proud people who’ve weathered centuries of invasions and occupations make this country unique.

All of these nuances are revealed through McCurry’s photography. His “Afghan girl” for National Geographic has become one of the most recognized images, but his whole body of work on Afghanistan is exceptional and gives more insights into the country than reams of news reports. He doesn’t avoid violence and today’s realities, but he also presents Afghanistan’s extraordinary nature and people and gives a glimpse into local traditions. If you aren’t in London or can’t make it to the exhibit, it’s worth taking a look at the selection of photos via the Beetles + Huxley Gallery website. Some of them are sad, others are beautiful, but all are bound to leave a lasting impression.

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Andy discovers another cheap and chic perfume.

Smell Bent is a small, independent perfume company with an interest in keeping fragrance enjoyable, affordable, and, above all, fun. The cheeky names and concepts behind their fragrances, including Monaco-Dependent and Violet Tendencies might sound wacky, but in a market where we’re up to our noses in increasingly expensive niche perfumes, I find a playful and inexpensive line refreshing. After recently testing some perfumes from the brand, one stood out to me above the rest, a fragrance called Commando.

At first I thought Commando would be bold and dynamic, as it sounded like a perfume one sprays on for combat. This was before I realized that the creator had another idea in mind—let it suffice to say that Commando is described “as close as it gets to wearing nothing at all.” Likewise, Commando is best described as a skin scent, though wearing it hardly feels like wearing nothing. Commando is both simple and strangely intriguing despite only two distinguishable notes, of musk and tonka. On the whole, this fragrance has little in the way of development, but the overall light and luminous effect is more than the sum of its parts.

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“The fragrance of magnolia is pure happiness,” said a friend of mine from Alabama. To her, the scent of magnolia meant the lazy days of summers, white sandy beaches and picnics on the grass with ice cold watermelon, crab cakes and banana pudding. Much later when I myself had a chance to visit the American South, I pulled down a heavy magnolia branch and leaned into a large white blossom. It smelled of melted lemon ice cream and green, not yet opened roses. I was drunk on the perfume of magnolias all summer long.

This heady, radiant aroma was likewise spellbinding for the Australian floral designer Saskia Havekes and two perfumers, Sandrine Videault and Michel Roudnitska. Havekes decided to capture all facets of magnolia and gave the perfumers carte blanche to create their Magnolia Grandiflora. Although both fragrances aim to give a realistic rendition, their creators leave enough of their own fingerprint and imagination. But they also reveal what a challenging subject they’d been given. The sunny radiance of magnolia is not easy to capture in a perfume bottle.

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