Perfume 101: 517 posts

The idea of picking up and moving to a new place has always seemed exciting to me. I was attracted by the idea of meeting new people, learning a new language, and cooking new foods. So, when it became obvious that my husband’s Belgian project is likely to turn into a permanent one, I fully supported his decision to accept it. The first few weeks of our stay in Belgium were a whirlwind romance, when every single quirk seemed charming and every new discovery a minor epiphany.

My vie en rose started to color grey the first moment I set foot inside the city hall that smelled of dust and desperation.  It suddenly became obvious to me that I’m not going back to the States at the end of the week and that this is not a vacation. As my list of things to do grew, everything became tougher. I didn’t know the rules. I missed the obvious social cues. A simple shopping trip felt like a nerve wracking oral exam in foreign language. One morning I felt so tired of everything that I just curled up under the blanket with hot tears rolling down my cheeks.

Anyone who has moved to a new place knows how hard these adjustments can be. I desperately missed my mom, my friends and my old way of life. Without having yet figured out the way things were done here, I felt very much out of my element. But I had to pull myself together. If I felt awkward and out of place, then I had to find small pleasures to comfort me while I got my bearings. Someone else might have poured themselves a drink, but I reached for another type of alcoholic substance–perfume.

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Summer is a wonderful time to wear fragrance.  It’s the season to break out the cool, the sparkling, and the refreshing.  It’s the season to leave behind the warm, the dense, and the heavy.  Orientals that smelled sumptuous at Christmas smell overstuffed in summer, a lesson I learned when I sprayed a thick woodsy vanilla on my wrist in Manhattan one hot July day.  Hours later, I couldn’t remember what the scent was, but I remember how it smelled.  The vanilla note that was so beguiling in winter had turned sour and unattractive.  The woods smelled not of a curl of smoke but of a soggy, recently doused fire.

I live in a place that I like to refer to as the “heat locker.”  It’s imperative that I have a library of scents that can carry me through six months of the year, most often in high humidity.  The scents I choose range from the effervescent to, paradoxically, the plush. It’s all in the nose (and skin) of the beholder!

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It is a few weeks before Christmas of 1978 and my grandmother and I are standing in front of an Elizabeth Arden counter in Bonwit Teller as she purchases a face powder.  My grandmother, a tiny woman in a doll-sized mink hat, likes to chat and to take her time making purchases. While she and the sales assistant debate the merits of a rosy powder over a beige one, I wander off to another counter.  I am too young to care about face powder but I am not too young to investigate the contents of the bottles of perfume that each counter has displayed in a prominent place.

There is a good chance I will get lost in this enormous space that smells of flowers, grass, leather, lipstick, vanilla, and powder. I pick up a bottle of Blue Grass, not knowing that this scent is homage to the state of Kentucky, where Elizabeth Arden (nee Florence Nightingale Graham, a Canadian) has a very successful horse-racing stable. Elizabeth Arden is one of three big American cosmetics brands that dominate the department stores. Arden, Helena Rubinstein, and Estée Lauder revolutionize and shape this industry and become American institutions, even if only Lauder was born in America.

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The beginning of my interest in fragrance coincided more or less with a momentous year in perfumery:  1981.  It was in that first year of what would later be called the Big Eighties that a Beverly Hills boutique released an eponymous scent housed in a box with yellow stripes that evoked the store’s awning. Giorgio was an immediate and a ubiquitous smash, a powerhouse floral so outsized that restaurants were said to refuse seating to Giorgio-wearing patrons.

Giorgio was only the beginning of what would prove to be the last era of “big” perfumes.  By the time super-scents Calvin Klein Obsession and Dior Poison were released in 1985, women were already wafting KL and Vanderbilt (1982), Ungaro Diva and Yves Saint Laurent Paris (1983), Chanel Coco, Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum, and Forever Krystle (1984).

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My father had a photographic memory. He could glance at a page of poetry, a list of numbers or a collage of images and remember them more or less precisely. It was something that left everyone awestruck and at parties he was happy to oblige by memorizing card combinations and such. Sadly, I inherited none of his prowess in this particular area; I had to build my own memory skills. As I became more interested in scents, I realized that more than anything else, perfume helped me reconstruct whole scenes. When I smell the honeyed sweetness of linden blossoms after a summer rain, I’m back in Kiev, walking down the sunlit avenues, a melting ice cream cone in hand. A whiff of Diorissimo—and I’m 5 years old, watching my mother put on her green checkered tweed suit and arrange her bob with a spritz of hair spray.

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