perfume memories: 14 posts

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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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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It started, like all overwhelming events, quite unexpectedly. First, the skies were tinged a pearly grey, then suddenly they whitened and broke into a rain of monsoon proportions. The staccato noise of drops hitting the roof, the surprising brightness of sunshine reflecting in the water, the steamy heft of air… Within seconds I knew that I might as well succumb–having discarded my useless umbrella and high-heeled shoes, I simply ran. When breathless and wet, I finally reached the apartment, the rain started to recede, turning mellow. The deep puddles were filled with green leaves and marigold petals, the street looked shiny and clean…

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The announcement came that my flight is going to be delayed by another hour. I actually love airports and have many pleasant memories associated with them, other than those times when I was either being interrogated by Italian custom officials or being taken for a drug smuggler by their American counterparts. Yet, I love the rush of the crowd, anticipation of a new journey, bittersweet pangs of parting, slight fear of take off, and impatience to arrive.

My maternal grandfather was the director of a factory that transformed fighter jets into passenger planes, and I grew up surrounded by airplane parts. The airplane is perhaps the first thing I recall from childhood. I remember floating dahlias from my grandmother’s garden in one of the containers made from a jet fuel cell. The silvery sides reflected intense sunshine, while the inner sides were coated with green slime from the constant contact with water. I would bend over the canister bringing my face closer to the sweet smelling water until my grandmother would warn me that I might fall in and drown. Somehow that did not scare me at all. Instead, I was fascinated by the silver well that tapered towards the bottom.

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I can give you a long list of reasons why I am scent obsessed. The main one is that nothing captures better the feeling of a place than its smells. Therefore, I would like to paint an olfactory portrait of each city that made an impression on me and take you on a journey. The first city I selected for this series is the city of my birth, Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The turbulent history of the city, from its grandeur as a capital of Kyivan Rus to the post-Soviet confusion, marks every stone on its streets. The gilded domes of the numerous Orthodox churches emerge from the lush greenery of the historic city on the Right Bank, while modern high-rises crowd the Left. Burial caves for medieval ascetic monks neighbor WWII memorials. Billboards advertising Nokia cell phones crown the baroque Stalinesque buildings of the 1950s. Most of my early scent memories are connected to Kyiv, and no matter where I find myself, I only have to think of a few scents in order for all its streets, sounds and people to spring from my memory. …

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