Reflections: 100 posts

The scene: Brussels, an early evening cast in grey light. A woman walking slowly down the street. Behind a window covered with condensation she sees It. If it were a French New Wave film, the woman would have met the love of her life with whom she’d spend the next hour and a half exchanging meaningful glances and an occasional quote from a postmodern philosopher. But being my life, this is an evening when I find mimosa.

No flowers make me lose myself the way these fluffy yellow pompoms do. I’m not the only one–a heavily pregnant friend once traveled from Brooklyn all the way to Manhattan just because she heard that one florist shop on the Upper West Side might have received a shipment of mimosas. When I walk home, my arms filled with the bouquets, even the darkening light seems to radiate the same lemon yellow color.

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Happy New Year! I am in the mood for softness, so I dipped into my bottles of vanilla, violet, mimosa and musk perfumes, trying to find ones with the most velvety and comforting finishes. Cacharel Noa stood out instantly for its enveloping trail of powdery flowers and vanilla, but my other discovery took me by surprise. It happens to be Miller Harris L’Air de Rien, a dirty orange blossom. Yet for all of its salacious air, it feels as soft as a cashmere wrap or a kitten’s belly.

New year means a new start to our Scent Diary. As I wrote in How to Improve Your Sense of Smell, the best way to sharpen your nose is to smell and to pay attention to what you’re smelling. It doesn’t matter what you smell, good or bad scent. The most important part is to notice whatever you smell around you. It’s even better if you write it down. You can use the space here for just that–sharing what perfumes you’re wearing and what scents you notice around you.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

Recently I was interviewed on the BBC about a new study on the attraction of smells we consider unpleasant. The research undertaken by a group of Scottish and Czech scientists revealed that women prefer the sweat of men who had eaten garlic. I was somewhat skeptical about the study and especially the explanations, but I find nothing surprising about the appeal of so-called bad odors. Our noses are more precise and interesting than we think, and it only takes a walk through a fragrance lab to discover what kind of unpleasant materials are essential for the most beautiful of perfumes.

This topic is the subject of my Financial Times Magazine column. I explain why bad smells are important in perfumery and even take you to a special place in the lab where pungent ingredients are mixed.

“One of the paradoxes of perfumery is that to create a good smell, you need a bit of funk. A strawberry accord won’t smell convincing without a sulphurous accent. Recreating a dewy white blossom requires the same substances that are present in horse sweat. There is even a space in every perfume lab devoted to materials with strong, reeking odours, and it’s appropriately called ‘the stinky room’. Next to the roses and vanillas in a perfumer’s palette, notes reminiscent of dirty hair, musty fur, burnt toast or decaying fruit have their place of honour – costus, musks, civet, pyrazines and many other pungent ingredients. They may be used in small quantities, but they’re important enhancers, giving vibrancy, texture and spice to an otherwise conventional fragrance.” To continue, please click here.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

I like Belgian rain. It sounds like a strange admission, but there you have it. Partly, it’s because I don’t like summer and heat. Another reason is that rain is an inescapable fact of life here, and my choices to deal with it are either to follow the lead of the Belgian Santa Klaus and move to Spain or to complain nonstop. The former  is infeasible, and the latter is tiresome. Instead, I begin to think of rain as something with beauty of its own.

And beautiful it can be. The fine mist that often marks the beginning of Belgian winter has a pearly glow, transforming the familiar red rooftops of the city into an Impressionist etude of soft brushstrokes. It’s the kind of rain that fools you into thinking that you will be fine without an umbrella, but it drenches you in a matter of seconds. When you’re at home, with a cup of tea and a good book, this rain is romantic and serene. Turn off the email notifications, add a drop of an iris perfume like Chanel No 19 or Annick Goutal Heure Exquise–rooty, cool iris smells of rain, so it’s an ideal companion–and imagine that the world has just stood still, apart from the changing patterns of raindrops on the window.

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“In the small bag that seldom leaves his shoulder as he traverses the dusty thoroughfares of his surrogate hometown, Younis carries a bottle of aftershave, a photographic portfolio and a copy of his CV.” When a reader sent me The Guardian article about a budding photographer and journalist, this sentence caught my attention. Younis, the protagonist of the story, is 19 years old; after he and his family fled Syria, they ended up in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.

Reading about refugee camps in the news rarely conveys the reality on the ground. One, of course, realizes that life is difficult in the camp conditions, because the opportunities are limited, especially since most countries hosting refugees don’t allow them to move freely, to work, or to attend school outside whatever is provided inside the camp. In addition, relief agencies are so severely underfunded that many have been forced to cut food rations and close clinics. It means millions of displaced people suffer from malnutrition and illness.

Even more difficult to convey is the sense of loss and psychological suffering that people fleeing from their homeland experience. Although my family left Ukraine voluntarily and adjusted to life in the US, I still feel the lingering pangs of separation that will probably never disappear. After more than 20 years, I can describe in precise detail my old room, the pattern of shadows on the windowsill made by the grapevines and the exact smell of the bookshelf (dark chocolate and smoky vanilla).  Sometimes I dream of walking through the apartment my parents and I shared with my grandmother and uncle–the cramped, Khrushchev-era flat was no paradise lost, believe me, but I still wake up in tears from such dreams. I can’t imagine the magnitude of this pain when one is forced to leave everything behind and when the road back may not be possible.

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