A life in perfumes

One cold January night in Paris, I rushed back to my hotel after several do you really think I should?? conversations with a close friend, to get ready for a first date. I didn’t expect much, but figured I’d at least an interesting memory out of it. I took a hot shower, put my hair in twists to dry and, as I had been instructed to do a couple of years before, I covered my damp skin with La Venus de Milo, a sublime dry oil of jasmine and musk from Officine Universelle Buly. Perhaps I was calling on the Roman goddess of love to show me the way. I walked down the small alley behind my hotel on Boulevard Saint Germain and joined the road that leads to the small island in the middle of the city. We met on the Pont Saint-Louis and walked together to his favorite brasserie.

The morning after we broke up, I slipped out of bed before sunlight and quietly walked out of his life and to the Francis Kurkdjian boutique in the Marais. A year before, I had discovered Baccarat Rouge 540, specifically the Extrait de Parfum, and it had quickly become my signature scent. On that morning when my world felt dark and lonely, I wanted a bottle of perfume, something beautiful to hold in my hands and the boutique was the first place that came to mind. And so I traversed Paris in a half circle, a sight to see for the early morning folks opening up their shops and cleaning the streets, and waited outside the store until they opened. Eyes finally dry in rebellion and heart beating so slowly that I wondered if maybe I actually did die after all. Later that day he asked me to meet him for lunch, no doubt to rewrite the final chapter I had given us; my Irish goodbye. We sat in the far corner of a cafe just down the street from the Pantheon and observed the lunch crowd: tourists, students, and office workers living another day in their lives. We were out of things to say to each other. Before I left, I took the bottle out of the the box and sprayed the scent on his coat pockets. I wanted his hands to remember me every time he took them out of his pockets. A goodbye letter of jasmine, amber, cashmere and saffron was all I could leave behind.

Last spring, I did something I used to believe I had no right to do. After a visit to Monet’s gardens in Giverny with a good friend, I booked a photography session for myself, for no other reason but to celebrate being alive, surviving the years we have survived, the body that I spent so many years condemning but now finally see as my ally. On my way back from the Trocadero gardens, I took a detour to the Galeries Lafayette and stopped at the Louis Vuitton beauty counter to touch and smell the collection of Les Extraits, housed in bottles designed by Frank Gehry. Stellar Times, with its woody white amber and soft orange blossom, reminds me of that day much more vividly than the actual photographs, which didn’t manage to capture the full scale of how it felt to stand in confidence and joy in the city that I love.

On the day that I would take my first airplane flight, wearing a blue badge with the words “unaccompanied minor” printed in large letters on the front, my grandmother took my hands in hers and told me that no matter what happened in my life, I would always have a place right here, and she moved my hands to her heart. From the collection of gorgeous bottles of perfume on the mirrored golden tray on her dresser, she chose Guerlain’s Shalimar and spritzed a little on my wrists, behind my ears, and on the ends of my scarf. I flew to America smelling like a voluptuous femme fatale on her way to meet her lover. I was eleven. I did buy myself a bottle of Shalimar once I began earning an income that can afford it, and while the scent itself is not my taste, it holds the memory of my hands on my grandmother’s heart. It doesn’t take a genius to know that my life in perfumes began in that moment.

Of course, not every scent carries a memory worth keeping, and there are some perfumes in my collection that are completely repulsive to me for one reason or another, but I don’t get rid of them because they are a record. And with any luck, someday I will be an old woman with a head full gray curls and a perfume collection spanning the decades of my life.

I hope you enjoyed this little stroll down memory lane with me. Recently I took a trip to Mexico City and shared on social media about a personal ritual of picking a scent for every trip, something that I took from my grandmother. It’s a simple drive, and the reason for it is described here as completely as I am willing: I try to preserve my memories in beautiful bottles, hold them in my hands, see them out in the world, and, sometimes, smell them on strangers.

Thank you for being here.