Molinard Nirmala as Ghost

Since the death of my friend several weeks ago, I've had a hard time moving forward. I suspect that's temporary. Everything but death seems to be. But for the time being, scent has become something slightly stagnant for me - talking about it, writing about it, smelling it. Scent is in a different place, far from the things I'm feeling.

My friend was an atheist and for the most part averse to scent, so memorials of one kind or another have been problematic for me. I did speak at her funeral, trying to put her character, or what I knew of it, into words, trying to take the occasion somewhere specific. When you take the spiritual element out of a service, as a pastor afraid of insulting a deceased atheist is apt to do, you're left with all the ritual but none of the crucial opportunities for catharsis. Putting words to her helped.

In the same way, I kept wishing that she'd loved scent, so I'd have something to go to for help getting through the feelings I've been left with. All I remembered was a conversation we once had. She said she couldn't wear anything but Champs Elysees, a fragrance famous for its inoffensiveness. Everything else gave her migraines, she told me. I'd never thought much of Champs Elysees but immediately, days after her service, went out and bought the biggest bottle I could find. I was knitting a lot, and sprayed it all over my neck. It was barely there, and made her absence feel that much more visceral. It was so simple and sweet that it reminded me of the childhood photo she'd left up on her facebook profile - someone only distantly related to the person I remember.

I wanted something that could conjure her more fully, the way scent can with people whose memory it recalls. It's the first time I've thought about what it means that so many of the people I'm close to aren't that into scent, and why I'm so often desperate to track down something they'll like. I must want to make sure I have some portal back into their presence once they're gone. Without that, they'll seem, like my friend, stuck in some kind of purgatory, I imagine.

So I was practically euphoric last week when someone we both knew called to let me know the things from my friend's office had been cleared out and put in boxes, and in one of these boxes was a bottle of Molinard Nirmala. I'd forgotten all about another conversation we'd had, and it all came rushing back, bringing her with it.

We were sitting there knitting and she told me she really loved Angel, but that she had a hard time wearing it. I'd just found an old bottle of Nirmala, which smells remarkably similar to Angel, and told her about it, offering to give it to her. Nirmala has none of Angel's patchouli. It's a more piquant exercise in that general direction, with a wonderfully strange pineapple note standing in. I gave her the bottle the next time I saw her and never heard about it again. I thought about it once or twice, wondering if she'd been able to wear it. I suspected she hadn't.

I inherited the Nirmala bottle a few days after I heard about it again in this phone call. I was anxious to see it for several reasons. She'd kept it at work. Didn't that mean she'd worn it? Didn't that mean she had an "office friendly scent"? Would any of it be missing? I dreaded the alternative. What if she hadn't worn it or connected with it at all, making it just this empty signifier left behind, signifying nothing?

The bottle was about a third empty, and another friend told me she'd often smelled it on her sweaters. I've worn it obsessively since I got it back, and it feels a little - enough - like she's with me.

Bottling Shame: Why Perfume is My Dirty Secret

After all these years, I'm still ashamed about perfume. I am ashamed, I realize - I must be - even though I talk about it openly and wear it fairly indiscreetly, and argue for dispensing with the idea of some stratifying line between what's "Masculine" and "Feminine" in fragrance.

Last weekend, a friend who doesn't know much about perfume came over to interview me and to see what I have. People often want to come over and talk about perfume. They know I have a lot and many of those things are things they haven't smelled. I have a reputation for giving full bottles of perfume away. That tends to draw a crowd. This friend really didn't want any, for a change. She was, I think, genuinely interested in what this interest says about me. I still gave her some, of course.

All day I was anxious and nearly called it off, mainly because no one's ever really seen my stash. My stash, even more than my writing, tells you exactly how deep the obsession runs. You see my stash, I think, and you see that something I talk about on and off is, in fact, something I never stop thinking about. The stash is excessive no matter how you look at it.

I'm always guarded about the way I bring things out for people to smell. I seat visitors in the living room and ask them to please stay there and wait. They sometimes try to follow me into the room where I keep most of my stash, and I don't want them to see it, so I preempt them by stationing them out of the way. I even did this when Olfacta was in town from Georgia. Olfacta must be as obsessed as I am - she is, judging by our conversations over the last couple of years - and yet like everyone else she was cock-blocked.

Once or twice someone has been allowed to follow me in, but I make them avert their eyes and promise not to look. It sounds deranged but it's true. And they agree, although whether they sneak a look when my back is turned is something I think about. When someone tells you not to look you almost always feel you should.

Generally I seat people in the living room, disappear into the stash, make some selections, and bring them back out, loading up the coffee table with bottles and boxes. We sit there and smell and I get to watch their faces either shrink in displeasure or light up in epiphany, and this format is a lot more comfortable for me because their exposure to the depths of my stash has been controlled and contained and doesn't distract from their reactions to the perfumes themselves.

I don't want them to see me digging through a puzzle of precariously stacked boxes. I don't want them to see the overspill onto the nearby floor. I don't want to look like one of the subjects of HOARDERS who, when the camera follows her through her home, tries to pretend that stumbling over mounds of shifting what-nots is no different than Donna Reed navigating a vacuum across the carpet in heels.

But I showed this friend last weekend everything. I even took her down into the basement, where I keep maybe a third of my stuff in two laundry baskets. I let her take pictures, showing the cinder block walls in the background, pictures I imagine will look like some clandestine meeting in an underground bunker, where bottles of perfume are rationed out like cans of past due-date soup.

Having her there made me aware of things I haven't had to be. I do think about how I store my perfume, but not why I choose one way over another. I have thought about how I spend time with the stuff I own when no one else is around, but I've never verbalized it, which can make you look at something in a different way. "How weird I do that. I wonder why."

It was the first time I'd told anyone, for instance, that when I leave for work every morning I fill a small bag with anywhere from five to ten perfumes, the same bag everyday, and that, ever since I got a baseball cap at some event I'd been to, I keep the perfume covered with the cap when I enter and leave the building, as if to say, "Oh - hey there; I'm just coming in with my little bag of baseball cap. No girly things in here." I knew I was dong this, of course, but somehow it was just something I'd started doing because the hat once fell on top of the bag, and eventually I kept it there, as a sort of "cover".

This stash has been building for over four years now. I've had plenty of time to organize it differently. Some people organize in nice cabinets or have efficient storage systems - this shelf for this, that shelf for those. I have enough room in my house to devote an entire piece of furniture to what I own. I have the room to organize it all in one place, where I could get to anything I might want to find easily, in one stop. Yet I keep it scattered in little areas about the place: here in a cupboard, there in laundry baskets, and in various other stacks of varying heights and loosely organized categories.

It occurred to me there's something pleasurable in shame - some frisson or excitement I want to hold onto. Why else would I persist in storing my perfume as one stores hidden things in attics or hard to reach, out of the way areas? I remember being a child, sneaking up into my grandmothers' attics, where forgotten relics were shoved, then forgotten. I got to discover them in secret. They were secrets because no one wanted to remember them. I wasn't supposed to be up there, so I certainly wasn't free to talk about what I'd found. My family wanted to forget the things they were reminded by these objects, without being able to actually let them go. The loot lived up there in a half life.

It's ridiculous to be ashamed at my age, though many people are, and for me it's even impractical. I'm way too open about what I do. I think it's because of that openness that I protect and store my stash the way I do. I want to preserve an air of sacred secrecy around it. I hide it from myself in little places I can return to in order to make my discoveries all over again, to relive that private joy repeatedly. I think shame might be a comforting feeling for me, rather than some artifact of immaturity I've never grown out of.

The perfume was moved into laundry baskets during the shoot for my last film. I needed to transport it to one of the locations we were using, and that was the handiest way. I don't remember where these bottles and boxes were stored beforehand. I never returned them there. Something about those laundry baskets rekindles the sensation of the profound hidden in the banal that I enjoyed during my childhood. The baseball cap is a way to keep my obsessional shame active, a way to carry it out into the open world with me without diminishing its powers. Not "Oh, there's Brian, with his bag of perfume again" but "What's with the bag and the cap?"

I guess shame has its uses.

If Fragrance is a Thing of Wonder, Why Do I Always Try to Put It Back in the Box?

A few days ago, doing some maintenance on the blog, I realized that I don't often review recent fragrances, and I started thinking about why that might be. Plenty of new things come out - there's a constant stream of things, and many of those are worth talking about. I could write a post every week about something new.

I used to think I was stuck in the past. Most of my posts are about fragrances that took hold in my memories a long time ago, even as far back as childhood. I don't think of Coco or Private Collection or any number of eighties fragrances without viewing them through a complex prism of memories involving my sister and high school friends and experiences, for instance. I tend to think about fragrances as specific points in time, and only have much to say about them if I've lived with them through something or they've fused with a nexus of recollections about people I've known.

I smell new things all the time. There isn't much that hits the market I don't smell and develop impressions about. But those impressions always seem premature, sort of flimsy to me. How can I really know a fragrance until it's lived with me? I marvel at other blogs. They remain so current. They have early impressions and those impressions seem definitive, written with an assurance that's pretty foreign to me so early on in my experience with a scent. I can see a film and know what I think about it pretty instantly, at least with the confidence to express an opinion about it, however much that opinion might evolve over time. With fragrance it's different for me. I feel like I know next to nothing about a fragrance and can't trust my initial sense of it with any kind of certainty after a few first impressions. I feel that way about people, too, however much I'm smitten with them at first.

I once interviewed several bloggers, asking them how they go about reviewing fragrances. I talked to about five people, all of whom said that they spend anywhere from a few days to about a week with a fragrance before writing about it. Like everyone else who loves perfume we're excited to start talking about it. We fall in love or we don't, and we document the affair. I've always trusted these early reviews, relied on them, hungry for other people's ideas about scents I'm coming to for the first time myself. That's part of my daily conversation. But the conversation that really sustains me is the one where people talk about a fragrance they've spent years with, revisiting it again and again over time under constantly changing frames of reference. It isn't just our own feelings that change. Culture itself shifts around a fragrance, distorting or revealing undiscovered facets.

Once we write about something, we rarely go back to revisit it in print, and yet we all know that the way we felt about a fragrance a month or even a year ago can seem totally alien to us when we smell it today. The fragrance boards are full of comments about virtually every fragrance on or off the market, detailing the time we've sat with them and the way we either confirm our first impressions or come around to the previously unknown attractions they've harbored. Myself, when I write a post, I always feel the pressure to look at something I haven't before; revisiting something I've already covered would be redundant, or would in some way undermine my credibility. If I disliked it or felt ambivalent about it last year but have since changed my mind, why should anybody read what I might have to say? Clearly it's untrustworthy. I'm supposed to stand by my opinion. What happens, though, when we're not standing together any more? Isn't there something to be said for being candid about that? Doesn't it say something important about scent?

The truth is, there isn't a day where I don't go to the perfume cabinet and pick something up, even something I've smelled regularly, and think, wait a minute, what's that? Where did that little thing come from and why didn't I notice it until now? The day to day reality of perfume for me isn't really reflected in the way I've written about fragrance. The way I feel about fragrance day to day is constantly shifting and re-situating itself. It's full of doubt and discovery and epiphany. Disappointment that turns to satisfaction. Estrangement that becomes intimacy. The blog is a ceaseless thrust forward, clocking things off one by one, avoiding the reality of fragrance's mercurial nature.

Isn't that a lot like the worst parts of the fragrance industry and the marketplace in general? I'm constantly bemoaning the way things are simplified or distorted by perfume creators and marketers, and yet the way I approach perfume in print supports that culture and those trends of impermanency and novelty. Something new every day. This is the latest: onto the next. By simplifying fragrance into a single, definitive entry in my quest for the new surprise or delight, am I contradicting how I really feel about it and what it means to me? Am I colluding with an industry I often feel hostility or bewilderment toward in confirming that one word is the last word?

I smelled Balenciaga Cristobal Pour Homme this morning, on a rainy, sleepy day here, and I liked it so much better than the last time I saw it. Sometimes the vanilla is all I smell, and I think of it as a sugary behemoth. Other times, I smell it and everything seems perfectly balanced. Sometimes it's more masculine; sometimes more androgynous. Even a fragrance like Coco, which I've always loved and never doubted, shows me new things, new textures and feelings, every time I smell it. Private Collection is often like an old friend - but I return to it each time feeling that as much as I've loved it all this time, I've also diminished it, because I can't see all of it or see it as it truly is. I keep projecting onto it, depending on my mood, and even though the projections are positive they feel like they have more to do with me than Private Collection ultimately.

Scent Memories: Three Women in Hickman, Kentucky

Around this time last year, I interviewed a woman about the scents the women in her family used to wear. Each of her aunts had her own signature scent. There was Dot, Baby Doll, Judy, Juanita, and Linda, the youngest. She said her aunts wore White Shoulders and Youth Dew, among other things, and together they represented what she called a "menagerie of scent." Until 2011, all of the five women were still living. Last summer, Linda was having trouble hearing and went to the doctor. Her body was riddled with cancer and she died about a month later. This summer, Dot died, leaving three.

Dot had kept up the family home in Hickman, Kentucky since their mother's death in '95. My friend, who is the daughter of the woman I interviewed, had been to the funeral and came back telling me about the place. She texted me pictures to illustrate. In the attic, there was an old Guerlain dusting powder box: L'Heure Bleue.

I've been wanting to make a western movie of some kind, ever since Abigail recommended the book The Sisters Brothers to me. The book was as fantastic as she'd said it would be, and instantly made me want to do something with some of that frontier mood. I told my friend I was writing a story but didn't have a house to film it in, and she mentioned this place in Hickman, and off we went with cameras and microphones to check it out.

Since Dot died, the house is just sitting there, used mainly for rare family get togethers. There are family photos all over the mantel and propped along the transoms. A sign between the dining room and the kitchen reads: "God help me to know when to keep my big mouth shut." In the small bathroom, there's a single bottle of perfume, an older version of Cachet.

The three surviving sisters knew we were coming and were at the house when we got there. They'd brought fried chicken, okra, and biscuits. There was Diet Coke in the fridge. They all sat in the living room while we took test shots of the place but it soon became pretty obvious that they were the most interesting things in the house. They talked about their memories of boys and each other and the people in Hickman. And I asked them about perfume.

Judy told me about the time she'd saved her allowance and the money she got for Christmas, which added up to 29 cents, to buy a perfume set which included powder. I can't remember what scent it was. Like her daughter, who I'd interviewed, she recounted what all the women had worn, but their stories differed slightly. They seemed to remember every perfume they'd ever worn.

There was a Hammond organ in the room and at one point Juanita played it while the rest sang hymns. Baby Doll was eating pie out of a tin dish and started to cry, maybe because all the talk about perfume brought back memories, and she felt the absence of Dot and Linda. When we left Judy told us she didn't know why they all got so mean but she thought it was probably because there were three men present, counting me, and men seemed to do that. I didn't think they were mean and I think maybe what she meant was that they got candid in a way they worried might be unladylike. I loved that they talked freely, the way I imagine they do when they're alone with each other.

Ahh, the smell of it! Calvin Klein Obsession

Calvin Klein Obsession for Women launched in 1985 when I was 14 years old.  I remember how profoundly the Calvin Klein brand permeated 80’s culture.  I remember the scandalous Brooke Shield’s jean commercials followed by the oddly androgynous and creepy child-porn Obsession perfume commercials.  I never wore Obsession when I was a teenager.  I was fixated on florals and florientals.  It probably wasn’t until I dove headfirst into my perfume habit in the very late 1990s (around 1999 I’d guess) when I first purchased and wore Obsession. 

Lately I’ve been obsessed with Obsession (so sorry, I had to!).  I’ve worn it a total of maybe 10 times since 1999 but all of a sudden over the past month I’ve worn if for days on end and I’m so impressed with it.  It’s possible this new-found love for Obsession has something to do with the lack of good mainstream releases.  When I compare Obsession with most celebrity scents and the latest stuff from CK, Gucci, Dior, Givenchy…well…pretty much EVERYTHING at Sephora (and almost everything which is a current bestseller) I come away thinking that Obsession is pretty fucking amazing.  Obsession is a classic oriental.  Truly classic.  It’s also sublimely dry and unisex.  It’s really a shame that Obsession is considered by many to be a “big over-the-top 80’s powerhouse” because I find it to be quite understated when not over-applied.  Obsession isn’t anywhere near as sweet or powerful as most current bestsellers at Sephora such as Flowerbomb, Prada, Pink Sugar, Juicy Couture, Lolita Lempicka, Ralph Lauren Romance, Dior Miss Dior Cherie and so on.  Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky (entirely possible!) but to disregard Obsession as dated or “too potent” seems short-sighted and inaccurate (or is the reformulated Obsession I now have drastically lighter?).

Recently I realized I can’t wear Shalimar but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love the idea of it.  Orientals are one of my most favorite fragrance types and I especially like dry, spicy, ambery-incense type Orientals.  Obsession is all this and more.  It begins with the Shalimar-type citrus burst, which might be off-putting to those who don’t admire this sort of oriental.  The vanilla and amber in Obsession are very close to the manner in which these notes are presented in Shalimar.  This is not foodie vanilla. Obsession isn’t too-sweet and doesn’t have those jarringly synthetic musks like virtually everything launched since the early 2000s.  This is a warm, spicy, ambery oriental that melds with your own personal chemistry especially in the dry down. 

Vastly underrated, truly unisex, Obsession blooms then mellows into a spicy Oriental which is classic but still effortless.  Obsession becomes me as opposed to the fragrance “wearing me.”  

For those around my age or older, here’s a fun blast from the past (Ahh, the smell of it!)

Pretty creepy, no?!

Here's a newer commercial, I think this dates from 2001, Benicio del Toro and Heather Graham look so young!

 I wonder when perfumes stop being considered "dated" and instead become enduring classics?  Do you think Obsession is or will ever become a classic (be honest, I have thick skin)?  Is Obsession already a classic?  Do you think Coco by Chanel has made it into classic territory or is considered by most to be dated or in the dreaded "old lady" category?  I'm just curious...

Angel Appreciation

Can you believe Angel is almost 20 years old?  Thierry Mugler’s Angel launched in 1992 and is far and away the most groundbreaking fragrance of the past two decades.

The first time I smelled Angel was December, 1997.  I was Christmas shopping at Macy’s in the downtown crossing section of Boston.  Angel will always smell like Christmas to me.  I have never been able to sniff it objectively, my first impression of Angel being tightly interwoven with the sights, sounds and smells of Christmas.  I was so struck by Angel on this day in the winter of 1997 that I remember what I was wearing.  I recall the heft of my chocolate brown suede coat and the over-the-knee dark brown boots I had just bought myself.  I was really into brown in the late 90’s.  I remember carrying several shopping bags which were cutting into my fingers and struggling a bit with my coat tossed over an arm as it was now too warm to wear it inside the store.   As I walked through Macy’s I was accosted by one of those enthusiastic sales associates with what seemed at the time like a machine gun of Angel at her side.  It was unusual for me to allow myself to be sprayed, but this time I did. Tis the season I suppose.  I let the sales associate give me a spritz and then kept walking.  

A few minutes passed before I sniffed the wrist where Angel had been sprayed.  I stopped in my tracks.  I was dumbstruck.  Angel was unique, unlike anything I had smelled before.  Somehow I had managed to be completely unaware of Angel from 1992 until my first encounter in 1997.  I smelled it on myself for the first time without any association of others wearing it around me.  Within five minutes I knew I must have this perfume.  I knew I would buy a bottle on my way out.

As I walked around Macy’s that day the entire city was dressed for Christmas.  Boston was strung with lights and there were Christmas trees and decorations aplenty.  These Christmas images melded with my first impression of Angel and I will forever associate the fragrance with festivity, joy, pine trees, candles and sparkling lights.  I’ve never been able to smell Angel the way others do; I have never smelled the super-sweet candy accord others seem to despise.  If I really think about it, if I dissect Angel, what I smells starts with a shrieky citrus blast which then mellows ever so slightly into a highly aldehydic, metallic, mentholated, sweet earthy patchouli.  This is technically what I smell.  But what I actually smelled that first time back in 1997 and still smell to this day are sparkling lights, candles, pine trees, cold air, damp snow, ice and a house warmly decorated for the holidays with a blazing fireplace and baked goods.  I smell promise and happiness.

Angel isn’t smooth, it is rough, a little pitchy and full of character. Her personality is like that overly dramatic friend, who embarrasses you slightly but has a heart of gold and is perpetually fun to be around.  I absolutely adore Angel.  It was love at first sniff.  Happy 20^th birthday, Angel.  

That Glass Tray Your Grandmother Kept Her Fragrances On

Some things are weirdly universal.  For the past week or so, I've been interviewing people, all women, about their memories of the perfumes worn by their mothers and grandmothers.  A few of these people know each other, but they'd never talked amongst themselves about the topic, and it was surprising how often the details of their memories corresponded.

All of them viewed their grandmothers as strong women, however quiet, composed, or simple.  All of them remembered their grandmothers storing their perfumes either in the bathroom cabinet or on a decorative glass tray.  What was it with these decorative glass trays?  My paternal grandmother had one, trimmed in gold.  I'm sure I could find many people for whom no tray entered the picture, but it seemed strange to me that all of these women share those kinds of memory details.  All of them remembered a specific fragrance - everything from Anais Anais to Youth Dew to Chantilly and Tabu.  Their grandmothers wore only the one, but almost all had one or two other fragrances on display.  Generally they'd been given these things but didn't use them.  Maybe it's the region - I live in Memphis - but these signature scents also seemed to be fairly pedestrian (i.e. widely available and not too expensive)

In contrast, my interview subjects all felt very differently about the perfumes their mothers wore.  While they wouldn't wear what their grandmothers had, these granddaughters appreciate those smells as nostalgic embodiments of women they miss.  When it came to their mothers' fragrances, the same kind of behavior and character traits they'd assigned to their grandmothers took on more subtly derogatory shadings.  It was clear to me, from the way they characterized their mothers, that these women were strong as well, but that's not how their daughters technically describe them.  Their mothers were "difficult" and wore their scents oppressively, whereas their grandmothers were simply bold.  They wanted to hug their grandmothers, to be embraced by their scents.  They wanted to avoid their mothers and to get as much distance from the smell as possible.

Their mothers wore loud, headache-inducing scents.  Their grandmothers just smelled distinctive.  It's kind of saying the same thing, but then it's hard to have these conversations because, as many people have noted, what a scent does in your head and how it merges with persona isn't easy to put into words.  I asked everyone what they think of when they smell their grandmothers' fragrances now, and generally what they came up with amounted to..."my grandmother".  One subject put it surprisingly succinctly.  She said that what comes back is everything, the totality of her grandmother, who she was, what it felt like to be with her.  She said that when she inhales the Avon body cream she took from her deceased grandmother's bathroom, she feels she's inhaling her grandmother herself - but that was an unusually articulate response.

I enjoyed hearing about the complicated relationships between women in these families, and it made me think a lot about the women in my family.  Some of the highlights for me: one woman's memory about cutting her lip when she was very small, and the way her grandmother's Youth Dew enveloped her as her grandmother tried to staunch the bleeding; a woman's memory of being in her grandmother's closet, fifteen years after her death, and the fact that the smell of Tea Rose still permeated the space; five aunts in one family who all had very different signature scents (Tabu on one end, White Shoulders on the other); the grandmother who graduated suddenly from her beloved standby fragrance to all things trendy, including Marc Jacobs Daisy; and the woman whose grandmother taught her to make her own perfume with vanilla extract and alcohol.

The biggest surprise?  Only one of these women held on to the single remaining bottle of perfume her grandmother left behind.

My Last 5 In-Person, Real Time Perfume Interactions

You might think that people comment on my perfume all the time.  Alas, they don't.  It's exceedingly rare that anyone says anything about it, and I wear, I imagine, quite a lot.  The last week or so has been a bonanza of interaction.  People at the store.  People at the dinner table.  On a park bench.  Passing on the street.

Here's something else:  I rarely smell perfume on other people.  It's a sad fact of life I try hard to accept.  My friend Jack and I talked recently about how much perfume we give away and how infrequently we smell any of it on its recipients.  I don't know why but lately that changed, too--if only just a little.  Here are the top 5 most recent encounters.

1. Standing in the perfume section of TJ Maxx.

Which is a pretty desperate state of affairs lately, by the way, unless you are so in love with Hugo Boss that you can never have enough of it.  I'm standing there, trying to be excited about the one vaguely interesting thing I managed to find, Si Lolita (I did not end up buying it but holding onto it for a time made me feel a little less despondent), and a woman asks me about it, wondering if I've smelled it and if it's any good (I have and it's okay, if your only other option is Hugo Boss), and I pretended to be buying it for a "girlfriend" because this always makes things easier, and suddenly the woman says, "What's that YOU'RE wearing?  That smells GOOOOOD."  I was wearing an oil I'd made.

2. Sitting down to Easter dinner in a double wide.

My friend's family invited me over to celebrate the holiday.  There were two rather large holes punched in the wall and I tried not to focus on how they might have gotten there, and so close together, as if someone lost his temper a lot but was able to really focus it in one little area quite adeptly.  The guy at the end of the table had a mullet.  The oldest son wants to be a cheerleader, and I think not the male kind.  The younger twins seem embarrassed by this.  The guy with the mullet was probably in his seventies and belched loudly and prodigiously.  There was something mocking about his mullet.  It dared you not to be offended in some way by it.  We were in a military town, and before the meal we'd been to the commissary, where I'd put on a little Youth Dew bath oil.  A little spot of relief on my wrist.  The woman across from me at the table--married, better or worse, to mullet-- suddenly perked up and said, "who smells so good?"

I felt my face turning red but figured oh to hell with it.  Me, I said.

That must be Obsession, she said.  I really like Obsession.

3. Sitting on a park bench next to an Indian burial mound.

I was talking to a friend.  A very attractive, newly acquired friend.  Very stylish.  Very well put together.  One of those guys who seems to have stepped out of another time--slightly vintage looking.  They don't make faces like his much.  You see them in old tintypes. He had on a boat neck striped shirt.  Thick blonde-ish brown hair.  There was a little breeze in the air, and I could smell his day on him, and underneath that, just faintly, the gorgeous, silky smell of Chanel Egoiste, totally personalized by a full 24 hours of wear.  He'd put it on that morning, he said.  It mingled with his cigarette smoke.  I had a little trouble focusing on what he was saying.  This is what perfume ads try to capture, I thought.

4. Warehouse office downtown.

A girl I know who has received much perfume from me, and never seems to be wearing it, smelled wonderful one day.  As we talked the smell came in and out, yanking me into different moods and thought patterns.  She told me she'd layered Jo Malone Grapefruit Cologne with Bond No.9's Scent of Peace.  The Malone she doesn't tend to think much of by itself, and frankly Scent of Peace is war on my nerves on its own, but the combination was just enough of a curve ball to call a truce, and super lovely.

5. Standing at the oil counter mixing something.

A guy came in looking for something for erectile issues.  I didn't know the store carried such a thing.  They went right to it.  He was looking at jewelry, too.  I thought, oh, some lady is really in for no end of trouble, and all she gets for the incessant "attentions" will be a little pair of silver earrings she's probably instantly plotting to return.

Another guy came in.  Some kind of itching disorder.  His wife believes things are coming out of her pores.  The ladies at the counter went right to the herbs again.  If you think the fragrance counter is full of intrigue you should step up to the oil section of your local hippie apothecary.

I was very fascinated by all this but kept focused on my oils, until some other guy came in looking for who knows what, and started sniffing the air.  What's that smell? he asked, obsessed.  It made me so happy.  I had all my little bottles open on the counter next to him: rose, patchouli, clove, cinnamon, ylang, Nag Champa, Jasmine, sandalwood.  Turns out he was smelling the rose geranium, which I'm pretty fond of, too.

Scent and Sexuality in the Seventies

Sarah Moon for the Pirelli calendar

In case you haven't read it, there's a wonderful meditation over on Perfume Shrine about Anais Anais, the iconic perfume by Cacharel.  Writing about Anais Anais several years ago, I appreciated its ad campaigns (old and new) but commented that the fragrance was pretty free of childhood associations for me.  Reading the Shrine article, which features information on Sarah Moon, the photographer of the fragrance's original look, all sorts of impressions came surging back, and I realized Anais Anais made more of an impression than I'd allowed for.   In concert with other social trends and currents of the time, it practically art-directed the era.

I was about ten years old when Anais Anais came out, and this very specific soft focus look was everywhere.  It was a sort of 1970s re-imagining of erotica popular in the twenties, the kind of images you'd see on forbidden postcards.  Women at their vanities, gauzy daylight filtering through lace curtains, eyelet-ridden blouses, crocheted shawls, long hair gathered in loose buns, off the shoulder lingerie, water basins and pitchers on antique wooden washstands, cascading ferns, heavy rouge and big doe eyes, canopy beds.  Reading the article on Shrine synchronized all these images from my childhood in Texas, and I was reminded how pervasively a Trifecta like fashion, film and fragrance could take over culture back then, before the internet, the cell phone, and the Twitter account shifted and dispersed the information landscape.

Scent Memory: Paris by Yves Saint Laurent

There was a time during my teens when every girl seemed to be wearing this, which made being a girl seem very exciting to me.

This Week at the Perfume Counter: Omaha

This Christmas, I puchased Guerlain Homme as a present for my father, thinking it would be a good everyday scent for a guy who probably doesn't have many and tends to play it safe. I guess I have no memory, and simply put early indications of his apparently intrinsic sophistication out of my mind temporarily. Entering his bathroom, I saw a 4.2 ounce bottle of Guerlain Heritage on the counter. It was half empty. I smelled what seemed like natural musks in it, so I assume it dates back to the time of the fragrance's release.

Seeing it there brought back childhood memories of my father's previous colognes. He never seemed to have more than one at a time--my father is a deeply pragmatic person when it comes to finances and possessions--but he did have, at some point, Aramis and Aramis 900. I remember his long dressing room, with its full-length mirror and the double sinks, which always smelled of one or the other. My dad used splash bottles. My aunt tells me she remembers him wearing Old Spice as a very young man, so maybe he picked up the habit there. His Heritage is also a splash.

The Whole World is Mothers and Daughters: Estee Lauder Private Collection (Review and Bottle Giveaway)

Private Collection is one of my favorite fragrances, yet I've resisted reviewing it until now. Like Estee, I guess I've wanted to keep it a secret. I'm not sure why I've been hesitant to talk about it, unless I just want it to stay in some magical, imaginative domain, some fantasy realm where only I know about it, as if it were made expressly for me. It's as if Private Collection and I are dating: I'm the geek, and Private Collection is very popular, and if I bring our relationship out in the open, no one will believe me, and it will be clear that it was all in my head: Private Collection belongs not to silly insignificant me but to much more important people in the world.

High school analogies are inevitable when it comes to this one, because I have such strong memories of my teenage sister wearing it. Remarkably, I've maintained a pretty fierce devotion to many if not all the fragrances she wore when we were growing up. I remember Coco, Bill Blass, Lauren, Albert Nipon, Anais Anais. As far as I can recall, my sister wore one at a time. We didn't have a lot of money--we were quintessentially lower middle income, Middle America--and when I look back I can't picture more than one bottle out on her dresser. She didn't have a collection. She emptied each bottle before moving on to the next, which probably went a long way toward building my own attachment to them.

For months she would smell exclusively, and strongly, of a single charismatic fragrance. Like a song you hear over and over, each fragrance became a sort of soundtrack to our childhood. I smell them now and, while I can't construct a chronological time line, I move directly back into the heightened emotional landscape of that period. Impressions flood back in. I remember the way the light came through my sister's bedroom curtains. I remember the feeling I got from that. I remember the painted treatment of her dresser; the way her room looked behind me as I viewed myself in her mirror, wondering what it was like to be her, or, at the very least, not to be me. I remember the feel of the textured green carpet in the hall outside our rooms, the way it rubbed on my feet. It was comforting, like being in your pajamas.

My sister wore a lot of Estee Lauder, so the soundtrack is pretty heavy on that specific, instantly recognizable instrumentation. Estee Lauder connected mother to daughter. It reinforced a cohesion in the home. Recently, an almost satirically snotty commenter referred to me as being "geographically marginalized," because, I suppose, as a blogger, when I want to contact a perfumer, whether to interview him or befriend him or, say, sleep with him, I must negotiate it all online, as if, by not living in France, I am out of some essential loop. It's a joke, of course, because at this point, no one is geographically marginalized. Ask Facebook. There's probably a perfumer or two waiting in your suggested friends box. There is no center. The world is full of centers. There is no "there" there anymore, as another saying goes.

Back when I was a kid, to be American was truly to be stuck in your own skin, in your own pocket of experience. A term like "geographically marginalized" would have meant something then. Corporations understand this as well. Estee Lauder achieved something back then that very few companies can any more. She was ubiquitous. It was a name and a brand that signified very specific things. Very American things. America was a conglomerate of remote, far flung outposts. You were alone in your experience and the world was way, way out there, somewhere past the shag carpeting of your suburban hallway--but others, way, way out there, were using Estee Lauder too. The name was everywhere. It was on TV, at the store, in magazines, on your mother's lips. Estee Lauder was a kind of American mother figure herself, and her brand reinforced an idea that all these geographically marginalized satellite points were connected, even if you couldn't prove it yourself or see exactly how. You trusted her on that.

You saw the Lauder name in your mother's medicine cabinet. In the family bathroom. In the make-up bags your sisters and mothers used. It was a reassurance of some kind. I wasn't attracted to women sexually but I was fascinated by them. They seemed connected in ways guys weren't. They seemed to understand those distances separating everyone and every thing. There was a combustible bond there between women which I thought must be unique to the gender. Estee Lauder seemed in on this conspiracy of connection. It was a secret code, a part of that language. You'd go to the mall and women were clustered around the Lauder counter. It was always the hub. It was hard to believe they were just talking about foundation and lipstick. The way they were huddled, their excited speech, indicated some sort of strategizing must be taking place, as if, across the country, they were all plotting their escape. I wanted them to take me with them.

My mother tells a story about me which makes a lot of sense when I consider it in this context. Apparently, I roamed away from her at the mall once. I couldn't have been older than five. She looked all over for me. She had security searching too. Finally, the sound of female giggling and chatter. As it turns out, I'd crawled into a glass-fronted display counter. They found me because a crowd of women had gathered around to watch. I was wearing a bra as a hat. I was putting on some kind of show. Maybe I wanted to be at the counter because that's where they all seemed to want to be. Obviously, I wanted to be part of that conversation. Now that I'm older, I understand that what they were talking about was less important than the basic fact that they were talking, which is kind of why I talk too, probably.

My mother or grandmothers wore Youth Dew and Estee. My sister went through Beautiful, White Linen, Cinnabar, Knowing, Tuscany, and, most memorably, Private Collection. I don't remember picking up most of her bottles. But I can say that, picking up my own bottle of Private Collection several years ago, I had an amazing sense of deja vu when I felt the thing in my hand. The glass has a specific feel to it. Your fingers make a unique sound whistling along the glass, a hushed but emphatic kind of thing. Of all the perfumes my sister wore, Private Collection had the most gravitas. It was formal in an outdoorsy way. It felt a little like Christmas, with its evergreen aroma and the kind of emotional intensity one finds centered a lot around the holidays.

My sister was popular but intense. I still don't know what was going through her head during those years. I still wonder. She was very pretty, gorgeous really. She was feminine, but like many of the women in my family she was also very headstrong in a way which indicated deeper reserves of masculinity. Private Collection shares a certain feeling of athleticism with another favorite my sister wore, Clinique Wrappings. It's that flushed sensation of someone coming in after a brisk run in the cold. There are florals in the mix (specifically, orange blossom, linden, jasmine, chrysanthemum, rose) but I never really notice them until I force myself to. Private Collection feels like a cold air fragrance to me. It feels like the outdoors brought indoors, like frost on the windowpanes. There's a brilliance to it, a sun on snow kind of quality. Its slightly powdery feel only adds to the wintry impression.

I don't know when it was created. It was released in 1973. Company legend has it that Mama Estee reserved it for her own use, before being convinced to pass it onto her daughters out in the world. I think another reason I've resisted sharing Private Collection publicly is the fact that so many react in visceral contempt for the brand and its fragrances, almost the way we grumble at the suggestion we've grown up to resemble our own mothers. We want to enforce a sense of separation there, maybe. How many times have you seen a mother protest when her daughter doesn't apply lipstick before a photograph? How many times does the daughter rebel? Maybe it's something like that. Estee is mom and mom tells you what to do. To love her is to mind her, and maybe it's impossible to appreciate our mothers objectively. Whatever the reason, I've chosen to avoid soliciting unfavorable scrutiny about Private Collection particularly. I want to protect it from that rejection, I guess.

I have a bottle to give away--but I should be clear: this is Eau de Private Collection. I'm not sure what the difference is. It's lighter, to be sure. It lacks some of the powder. And I believe it lacks oakmoss and some of the heavier players which make the base of Private Collection proper so durable and persuasive. However, it's very similar; i.e. wonderful. The bottle is 1.7 ounces. To be eligible, you must have commented on this site before. Drawing will be conducted Monday. Conducting these giveaways, I realize, is a way for me to get back into the glass fronted counter. See you there.

White Linen & The Summer of '86

My parents divorced when I was 14. I have a very kind and wealthy aunt who decided to give my mother and me a fantastic gift. My aunt gifted us a 3 month trip to Europe during the summer of ’86. My mom took a leave of absence from work and we were able to take off on an unforgettable adventure, forgetting the divorce, and all the typical issues of day-to-day life.

My aunt also gave me a perfumed gift set as a going away present. She chose Estee Lauder White Linen, which was extremely popular in 1986, so I left for Europe with the body lotion, shower gel and perfume. For the rest of my life, the scent of White Linen will remind me of that fabulous trip. I’m not sure if this is still the case, because I haven’t sniffed White Linen in years, but when I imagine White Linen I can feel the heft of that frosted glass container the body lotion was housed in.

Being 15 years old and traveling for 3 months with one’s mother can be a little tricky. I was the poster child of a rebellious teenager and my mom and I were already having lots of trouble getting along, and, of course, 95% of the time it was my own fault. But when we got to Germany, the first country on our trip, we were so happy and interested in everything that it was fairly easy to let everything fall into place and treat each other nicely. Our first stop was to visit my uncle and his wife in Munich. My uncle’s wife is a gorgeous Korean woman, who turns out to be one of the few people in my family who wear fragrance. She always had a bottle of Shalimar, and I think it was the pure parfum, on her dresser. Her name is Chong Suk and she was/is gorgeous, with long flowing blackish-blue hair, perfect skin and fashionably dressed (heels at all times). Chong Suk and I did some damage shopping in Munich. She also bought me a bottle of Shalimar for myself. But I didn’t open Shalimar, I was using White Linen on this trip, until it was empty.

We stayed in Germany for almost two months, using my uncle's home as our launch pad and taking several long weekends and extended trips to Belgium, France, Spain and Switzerland. Everywhere I went White Linen came with me. I always used the body lotion after shaving my legs and I would cup my hands over my nose giving it one last big huff when I was done. White Linen seemed so clean, effortless and sophisticated at this juncture in my life. We spent a week in Paris, which oddly, wasn’t the highlight of my trip. We did all the museums and all the sights that tourists must do. I ate escargot and macarons. We pretty much didn’t leave a stone unturned. My mom had a friend, a distant cousin, whose apartment we stayed at in Paris, so the experience seemed as authentic as can be.
In Paris I bought a few gifts for friends back home. I chose Rochas Lumiere because I loved the bottle. I haven’t a clue what Lumiere smells like, but the bottle was purplish, romantic and feminine. I ended up keeping a bottle for myself. No surprise there.

Our last month was spent in the United Kingdom. My mom had a friend whose flat we stayed at in London for a week. Then we spent 9 perfect days staying at the Savoy in London where we had afternoon tea every day and at night attended the theater. I visited my pen pal who I’d been writing to since the 5th grade just outside Bath, England. Anne, my pen pal, turned out to be aloof and not what I expected, but it was still an experience hanging out with her for a few days.

My best friend Megan gave me a few mix tapes before we left. I listened to these mix tapes constantly while we were in the car, train or subway. I had a boy crush back home. Tim and I weren’t technically dating, we had only kissed once at the movie theater, during a showing of Nightmare on Elm Street, but I thought about him nonstop while listening to Madonna’s True Blue. Even though I was having the time of my life, it did feel a little scary missing out on a whole summer of friendship, gossip and goings-on back home. I wasn’t listening to Tears for Fear Everybody Wants to Rule the World over and over again like everyone in America; this wasn’t playing on the radio in Europe. I caught up with MTV, the gossip and the music scene once I returned, a slightly different person.

Mom and I then took an ultra touristy bus tour across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It lasted 3 weeks and lucky for me there was a whole contingent of teenagers traveling with their parents on this trip. Now this was fun because I could sneak off with the teenagers and get into little bits of trouble here and there. Don’t forget, back in ’86, it seemed the UK had a relaxed attitude towards the drinking age, so there was lots of fun to be had. I met a boy on this tour, his name was Adam, and we had a 3 week teen-aged love affair. I remember one night after sneaking out of his room (no, THAT didn’t happen in case you’re thinking I was THAT rebellious), he said “you always leave such a pretty trail of fragrance after you leave me,” and here I am thinking all these years later that this was the very definition of sillage, I was leaving Adam a little White Linen scent trail.

This 3 month trip didn’t heal all our wounds but it allowed us to forget about many of our familial problems and gave both my mom and I a lifetime’s worth of memories. The sensation of those White Linen bottles in my hands and the scent of its perfume, both on my person and emanating from inside my suitcase is an embedded scent memory and so much a part of my European adventure of ‘86. I finished off all the White Linen that my aunt gave me by the end of the trip. As much as I loved White Linen that summer, I never bought it or wore it again. White Linen remains the summer of '86 for me.

The Last Ten Reactions to a Fragrance I Remember Getting

1. Movie Theater

I watched a local film with three friends. Two were a married couple. The third was a good friend of mine. He's used to the way I smell. Several times a week he visits and we watch trash TV, and along the end table between us are typically lined anywhere from six to ten fragrances. I make him smell most of them, even though his assessments ("vinyl raincoat mixed with cat pee" is one of my favorites) tend to break the lofty fantasies I'm trying to build around them. Many people I know are well aware that I'm "really into" perfume. I forget that some people have no idea. When we left the film we all stood outside to talk about how horrible it had been. The sound, the performances, the direction (what direction?), the lighting. "And some woman sitting behind us was wearing the stinkiest old lady perfume!" said my friend's wife, aghast. It was like she'd survived an incident involving a rather virulent nuclear leak. "That old lady was me," I told her.

2. Editing Suite

A couple times a week I've been working with my co-editor on a film we shot this year. Neither she nor her girlfriend seems to wear perfume. They don't even seem to wear oils. She knows I like and write about perfume; it shouldn't come as a surprise, as the film is thematically tied into fragrance. One day, she emailed me to discuss our work the day before. Her room still smelled like me, she said, meaning my perfume. I can't remember what I was wearing but because we'd been working so closely and it's so hot I probably went easy on her and used very little. She said she liked it, which made me feel good, because even better than having your perfume complimented is having its memory installed, appreciated, and associated with you.

3. Email

Sometime last year--maybe the year before--I received an anonymous email. Whoever it was had signed up with an online service which basically allows you to insult people safely. Whatever you say can't be traced back to you. It's the loveliest thing. I rarely get comments on what I'm wearing. So it seemed strange to receive this notification. "Someone wishes to inform you that your cologne is unusually strong," it said. I know many people but like most of us I see the same several faces day after day, mostly at work. It was probably a co-worker, and I was annoyed that she couldn't just bring it up in person. I never heard about it again but have been paranoid ever since.

4. Workplace

I work with three women. One never says a word about whatever it is I'm wearing. When I asked her what she wears she says Chanel No. 5, though only on special occasions. Another co-worker says something about my perfume only rarely. Usually, when she likes what I have on, I give her some. The third party tends to go into paroxysms of pleasure every morning when I make coffee. She doesn't drink it but loves the aroma. She also sneezes a lot in the other room throughout the day and I generally take this to mean that I've over applied. This might be a product of the aforementioned paranoia. I asked her at one point whether her nose is particularly sensitive to smell. She said yes. I then asked whether the things I wear bother her. She said they usually don't, although there is one thing I've worn that gives her a migraine. More paranoia. What could it be? Every morning I wonder: Is this the cologne she was talking about? The whole thing seems bizarre to me because I'm fairly conversant about fragrance and read the forums like crazy and know which ones are considered scent bombs and which are inoffensive (i.e. non-entities, if you ask me) and I've always been conservative, both in what I choose to wear at work and in how much I apply.

5. Coffeehouse

It's four o'clock and I have recently reapplied. I'm very likely wearing at least three different things, which must smell like a melange to everyone else. Me, I can only smell what I just put on. I go to the counter to get my coffee. One of the teenagers who works there whispers something about me to her co-worker, whom I know better. The co-worker says, "He ALWAYS smells good," and she smiles at me. This makes me happy but also paranoid. Writing all this, I'm starting to realize how afraid or anxious I am most of the time: afraid of offending, afraid of being smelled, being discussed as a stinker, wanting to stand out but afraid of it too. In a general sense the comment made me wonder how often people like something I have on and say nothing.

6. Car

Recently, a friend got into my car and, after buckling in, said, "Your car always smells so nice."

7. Boyfriend

When I first started wearing things--which is to say ten things at once--he would migrate to the back room for refuge. On several occasions he pleaded with me, or simply said my name urgently, because we both knew without speaking what he was getting at; essentially, "please stop." He never does this anymore. He never complains. I don't know what happened. Maybe he's desensitized. Maybe the behavior seems less compulsive now, more routine, and therefore doesn't bother him as much--or, cross fingers, at all. Every once in a while he comments on something I've sprayed. Who knows what, because when I'm at home I have at least five fragrances up and down my arms. He smells the little pools on my skin until we determine which one he likes. Last time it was Amber Ylang Ylang.

8. Coffeehouse

One of my best friends is a straight male. We work on movies together. He was always slightly bemused by my perfume habits, as if they were the behavior of some weird, unclassifiable creature from a parallel dimension, harmless but curious. Then I found out that he had a special bottle of Riverside Drive by Bond No. 9, which is hardly typical for a straight guy, making him something unclassifiable himself. When I found discount bottles of Armani Prive Bois d'encens, I brought it over immediately, knowing he'd be hooked. Later, we screened at a film festival in Chicago and I took him to Barneys with me, just to watch his mind get blown. He left with a bottle of French Lover. He often tells me I smell good. However, one day, greeting me outside a coffeehouse for a get together, he said, "You smell like tampon."

9. Friend's House

I visited a friend in Los Angeles after sniffing at Barneys, Saks, and Nordstrom. I had scent strips with me and forgot them when I left. My friend told me later that her cats had gone crazy for whatever was on them, rolling around the floor like they'd gotten into catnip.

10. Wedding

I wore Bandit parfum extrait and lots of it to a friend's outdoor wedding. She and I often discuss perfume. I've given her: Nombril Immense by Etat Libre D'Orange, Nuits de Noho by Bond No. 9, Angel Violet, Marc Jacobs Violet Splash, Fresh Sake, and others I can't remember. I worried, before leaving the house, that no one would smell the Bandit, so I added some Azuree. When I left the wedding, I hugged the bride good-bye. "You always smell so good," she whispered in my ear.

The Whole World is Mothers and Daughters

My mom lives only two hours outside of town, and I haven't been to see her in over eight months. There's a perfume shop at the halfway mark. Nothing you can't find online at less than half the price, but it motivates me; if I can just get in my car and drive an hour, it's an instant fix. This trip, I pick up stuff I already have, mostly. I do find a tester bottle of Ungaro, the one Francis Kurkdjian did several years ago. Versace White Jeans. Luckyscent the place is not.

My mom lives out in the middle of nowhere. Fifteen years ago, she and my stepfather made a conscious decision to remove themselves from society, a series of life moves I've been trying to understand ever since. Like her own mother, my mother rarely makes the effort to visit her children. Perfume isn't the same kind of motivator for her it is for me, and taking care of her husband and dogs makes leaving home for any length of time very difficult, she says. A year ago, I didn't speak to her for months, after she promised to make the local premier of my first film and backed out at the last minute. She'd missed my first book signing for the same reason: who would feed everyone in her absence?

So there's some baggage involved in these visits, and typically I arrive with my feelings shut down. I go straight to my room, and try to make myself come out. It's so quiet and remote where she lives, so slow, that for the first forty eight hours I can barely keep my eyes open. It's like checking into rehab; like coming off speed. You crash hard. This makes quick, overnight stays problematic. It also works against me, because I seem not to want to help around the house or engage in any social interaction, adding to the overall impression my mom and stepfather have of me being a total jerk off.

I try to create things to talk about, so that I have some kind of outlet and can direct the conversation myself. This time, I go straight for the perfume I've given my mom over the last few years. She always loved Joy, but she hasn't worn any of the bottle I bought her. The vintage Chanel No. 19 seems untouched, too. I feel guilty for wanting to take them back. She does seem to like the Fath de Fath. She admits she wears that one the most.

I've packed her a grab bag of presents for Mother's Day, including a few small perfume decants, and I wonder whether she'll use them. She tends to save things. The perfumes are in their boxes, sitting out on her bureau. Last time, they were in the closet. I'd warned her about keeping them in the light. But a closet is a miserable place to keep something like perfume, especially when you really only look at the stuff, so she boxed the bottles and brought them out: a happy medium. While we're in the closet, she points to the highest shelf, where a large blue plastic tub sits. "That's where I keep all the letters you and your sister have written me," she says. "If anything ever happens to me. Just so you know."

I feel weird in anyone's house who doesn't have a special relationship with at least one perfume. It's like someone who never had children or a pet. There's some kind of emptiness there. My mom had me and my sister but something about the quiet out in the country reminds me of her loneliness and has the same basic effect. It makes me want to get out. Or to smell a lot of perfume in private. I brought about fifteen bottles with me. That seemed like a reasonable number at the time. Now, in this barren environment, it seems lavish, remarkably excessive.

My mom was one of three sisters. Her mother was pretty tough. I don't remember any of them wearing fragrance. I do remember a special bottle of perfume in my grandmother's medicine cabinet. It was special to me, anyway. I stole it when her health started to wane. Who would ever give it to me? I don't remember my mom wearing perfume as a child, though the bottle of Oscar she has now seems to have been around forever. I remember it sitting out on her dresser as far back as my memories will take me. It occurs to me that her perfume would probably be fine wherever she puts it. The Oscar has traveled all over the country, sitting in cars, boxes, bathrooms, and bureaus. It smells like it always did.

I don't know where my thing for perfume comes from. I wonder about it, as I smell my perfume stash behind closed doors in my mother's house over the weekend. I'm careful not to spray too much. I can write whatever I want about the genderlessness of scents on a blog, and I can wear whatever I want pretty fearlessly most everywhere in my life, but this is Arkansas, and my stepfather is a truck driver, and I can't imagine Poison going over so well at the dinner table. I feel as if I'm huffing glue. The act is so clandestine. All weekend I have sudden surges of memory; what it felt like to grow up in places I had to try to try so hard to fit into. At some point, I spray on Angel, and I think about that fragrance in an entirely new light.

Angel is beauty and force. It's a mingling of opposites, a declarative mission statement. I understand now why I feel so great wearing it. Angel means not having to hide anything. It's a rebellion, like some hostile act of beauty. You either get it or you don't. This is a stretch, but during my visit I read a book on the Columbine school shootings. I also watched Man on Wire, a documentary about the guy who walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center Towers in the seventies. Inevitably, I viewed Angel and my feelings about my upbringing through the prism of those two influences.

Here were two senseless acts, both of them driven attempts to reorder a universe. It's amazing, how much time and effort, how much focus and passion, went into planning the Columbine attack and the walk between the towers. All kind of subterfuge was required. These people planned their acts of defiance for over a year. They had no real lives to speak of as they prepared, like monks, for these fateful days. Each was thoroughly unhappy with the conventions imposed by society. And look how different the results of their malcontent. The people who looked up to the top of the towers from the sidewalk saw inexplicable poetry. It changed them. The act spread hope and possibility through generations in one way or another. It hurt no one. Witnesses to Columbine have had their lives rent apart. They're still trying to make sense of what happened; the hate and unhappiness fueling the incident. The parents of the killers have asked themselves every day since what they must have done wrong.

All of these things came together for me as I sniffed Angel and others furtively at my mom's. I've always been at odds with her. I've always protected her from the complications of who I am. We talk about what she can handle. We hardly know each other. What kind of inner life must she have, I wonder? What must it feel like to be so disconnected from your son? The Columbine kids were in the basement everyday, plotting, fantasizing, assembling pipe bombs. Right under their parents' noses. Dylan Klebold, one of them, was horribly depressed. He was miserable in his life, and totally alone in it. Reading the book, I kept thinking, he and his mom must have been disconnected.

I remember when I first got Angel. I'd sprayed some on a strip of paper and had it in the car with me. My mom was in town on a rare visit, and I took her out to dinner. When we returned she asked what the smell was. I felt awkward about telling her, but it was such an obvious smell. There was no hiding it. Back then, it still seemed slightly feminine to me. Now it's androgynous, but only the way glam rock is. My mom put the strip to her nose and seemed to really like it. She wasn't put off at all. I was amazed she saw the beauty in it. I considered getting her some but knew she'd never wear it. No. 19 I can bear to see unused. Seeing an untouched bottle of Angel would feel like someone cut down in her prime.

I'm a filmmaker. My mother still hasn't seen my first film, though it's been around the world. I think she's scared to see it. It's sad, because so much of me and my childhood went into it. The movie I'm finishing up now is based on a lot of my experiences, too, though it's all been fictionalized. It has a lot to do with motherhood, with the complex relationships mothers have with their daughters, and vice versa. Growing up, I watched the women in my family as if they were in a movie. Their lives seemed so interesting. One of the characters in this film, a home shopping network saleswoman, gets in an argument with her boss, who wants to take away her callers, most of them women. She talks about her mother and their children with them. Some of the women have been calling her show for years. "The whole world is mothers and daughters," she tells her boss. "The whole world is mothers and daughters, and what's going on between them."

Like her boss, I've often felt outside the world of women in my family. But I'm fascinated by the connections they make, and I've always wanted to be a part of them. I never planned to hide in the bathroom with perfume. It was never my intention to be disconnected from or at odds with my mom, and I often wonder where things went wrong. Still, I look around and see it could have been much worse. And we're both trying, though we act as if we have all the time in the world to get it right. I know perfume is a crucial component of the connection I keep trying to make, the poetry I keep trying to create between the two of us. I keep throwing the line out, hoping for magic.

Ralph Lauren: Vintage Lauren and a burst of 80's memories

Wow. Vintage Ralph Lauren Lauren. I just had the strongest memories of high school after smelling it. I wore Lauren occasionally in the mid-80’s, I might have owned a bottle, not sure, but many of my friends wore it as well as their older sisters. I have always associated White Linen, Beautiful, Poison and LouLou with high school but I guess it’s been nearly 20 years since I smelled Lauren. Truth is the reformulated Lauren is tragic. It smells nothing like original Lauren. I know because I bought some for nostalgia’s sake a few years ago and was confused. I couldn’t remember why I liked it so much. This was because it’s not the same fragrance and the new crap is entirely different. I have no idea why they would butcher such a classic.

Junior High: monogrammed Bermuda bags from Pappagallo. Handmade braided hair barrettes with long flowy ribbons. Sticker albums. Duck boots. Duran Duran. Van Halen. Prince. Cyndi Lauper and Madonna. Ralph Lauren Lauren brings it all back so vividly. We used pay phones back then. I think they actually cost 10 cents. We could smoke in the movie theater (how dreadful) and cigarettes weren’t all we were smoking. Skin tight Guess jeans with ankle zippers. Everything else was baggy. I got an Apple computer as a freshman in high school; this was so cool. Arcades. Do you remember we actually left the house to hang out at the mall and go to the arcades? I had the high score on Ms. Pacman. How many times did you see Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Less Than Zero and A Room with A View? Then came “alternative music.” In Boston, this was WFNX, 101.7. The Smiths, The Cure, PIL, This Mortal Coil, The Violent Femmes (I can still recite about every lyric from the Violent Femmes), The Cult, REM (which I never really liked, I pretended to like REM), INXS, The Velvet Underground, They Might be Giants, Pixies, 10,000 Maniacs, Ministry, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, New Order. I wore only black from about 1986-1989. I was so goth.

Goodness. I haven’t thought about Rob Cheevers, my major freshman crush, in ages. He was a senior I was a freshman. So cliché. I just about stalked that poor boy. Dear Lord Rob Cheevers is over 40 now. He’s probably fat and bald. Demi Moore was flat chested in the 80’s. Tom Cruise was relevant. Molly Ringwald had the puffy lips, much before Angelina Jolie.

Sigh. RL Lauren, you smelled so pretty. How times have changed.

Some Thoughts on the Year: All the World's a Bathroom

I'm a latecomer to perfume, and 2008 was my awakening, starting with Vetiver Extraordinaire. A friend wrote about Vetiver Extraordinaire in a French magazine, making it sound like the best thing in the world. The only thing in the world. I'd visited him in Atlanta several months before and was shocked and a little uneasy when, watching a play in a dark theater, he pulled out a bottle of Comme des Garçons 2, uncapped it with much drama, then sprayed himself, and everyone around us, profusely.

It seemed hostile and generous at the same time, part assault, part act of mercy. When I asked him about 2 he mentioned he'd been writing about perfume a lot. I was fascinated. Write about perfume? Here was a serious, well known writer, respected for his novels about the lower east side and the denizens of old Times Square. Was he doing it in secret? Later, he emailed me the copy of his article on Vetiver, showing his real name, right at the top. I asked for a bottle last Valentine's Day. It seemed appropriately extravagant for the occasion: it came from far away (I ordered from France, if you can believe it, which shows what I knew), was costly (or so it seemed, compared to the mall), and surely, I figured, it would be a special perfume for special occasions.

At the time, I had maybe four or five fragrances: an old bottle of Coriandre, a Fragonard, something by Aveda, the original Comme des Garçons. It wasn't that I hadn't bought scents in the past. I just didn't know where to look. I didn't even know anything like Vetiver Extraordinaire existed, the world of niche perfumery being subterranean territory to me. My bottle of Coriandre reminded me of high school. I used to sneak into my stepmother's bathroom to smell it.

I did a lot of sneaking into bathrooms back then. When my sister or stepmother emerged from their rooms, they smelled fantastic. Their scents had gravitational force, and everything around them collapsed into that central point of interest for me. I envied that power. More importantly, I envied them that pleasure; that drama and intrigue. There was even solace in that dynamic somehow. Scent was emotional armor and hypnotic allure. Buying Coriandre later was a bit of a defiance for me, but I treated it the way I always had: I kept it in the bathroom, smelling it every once in a while or even obsessively. I never wore it, unless getting into bed, where no one would catch me.

I still remember the day Vetiver Extraordinaire arrived in the mail. It was packaged beautifully, and the glass bottle and chunky cap had a heft to it which seemed important, even momentous. It smelled like nothing I'd ever experienced. Dry and wet simultaneously, grassy, sheer. What was this vetiver stuff? A plant--a grass, you say? I sprayed some on at work and the whole office shifted. It was so combustible. It engaged the people around me, altering their behavior, altering my mood, my attitude, my imagination. It truly was momentous, and in the weirdest possible way.

I started researching perfume. Here was my stepmother's bathroom, spread out all over the world. A little bathroom called Frederic Malle, in Paris, France; stark and sleek, black and red and dull green glass. Little bathrooms called The Different Company, Le Labo--and hey, what about that Comme des Garçons perfume the writer had employed to change the course of the play we were watching? What of number "2"?

The first part of this awakening for me was a systematic run through of all the perfumes which had ever secretly captured my imagination. First up was Angel. Years ago, when it came out, I'd smelled it as quickly as possible on the shelves. What would I do if a saleperson came over and started asking me questions? I wanted that smell for my own more than anything. This year, I bought it at the mall, where the saleswomen indeed hovered around me, sizing me up. What kind of husband or boyfriend was I, their eyes were asking? How big a dupe? They talked me into the most expensive bottle they had, deluding me somehow into believing my girlfriend (essentially myself in this scenario) deserved the very best. Hadn't she waited long enough?

A month or so later I visited Portland, wondering, "Do they have any interesting bathrooms?" They did! The Perfume House, my host said, but she didn't think it was much. It was closed the first few days of my trip and I passed the time in Nordstrom and Saks, where I got Declaration Essence and smelled Gucci pour Homme for the first time. When I was looking at Declaration Essence, I sprayed it ever so slightly on my wrist. No no, the saleswoman said, taking the bottle from me. "How will you enjoy THAT?" Before I could answer she'd sprayed more perfume than I'd ever dared, covering my wrist in a wet pool of smell. It was so strong that when I walked into the nail salon to let my host smell, it registered over the toxic stench of nail products. I walked around inside the dream of that aroma all day.

The Perfume House really did it for me. Located in an old home on the middle of a busy street, its curious effect on my outlook was incalculably transforming. For someone who associated perfume with private, clandestine areas of the house, being in a house stocked full of bottles, everywhere you looked, was revolutionary. I can't explain how life changing this was for me. It took perfume out of the bathroom: brought it right out into the open, into the living room, the bedroom, the foyer, the bedroom. And everyone came out with it, setting bottles and cotton swabs of scent all over the counters and shelves. It was a four day conversation about perfume and for once the subject didn't feel like a dirty secret. The whole history of the world was tucked inside the topic. How strange to emerge from the building. Out on the street, no one else seemed to be having the conversation.

Over the next four or five days I spent roughly ten hours there. It was an intensive crash course on just some of the variety available in fragrance. Lutens, L'Artisan, Amouage, Piguet, Carthusia, Lalique, Patou, Crown, Goutal. The owner and his staff were wonderful. They made no assumptions, no value judgments, knew something about everything they stocked. What they couldn't remember they immediately looked up, without my having to ask. I bought five or six perfumes that trip: Dzing!, Sables, Bois 1920 Classic, Comme des Garçons 2, Chypre Rouge. My last day, I had a cold and was quietly devastated that I couldn't smell the things I'd bought. Regardless, I didn't want to leave.

The interesting if perhaps predictable thing is that since that time I have purchased everything I smelled and liked in that store over the course of those four days. And then some, naturally. Am I trying to make up for lost time? Maybe. Last night, thinking about it all, I suddenly considered again how brief everything is. I'd been out to dinner with my friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. Time telegraphed back and forth in my head and I got sad thinking how ephemeral life can be. Your relationships and the things which mean so much to you are blips on the screen, brief and fleeting. It tortures me. Someone's face eventually becomes a photograph, frozen in time, telling only a fraction of the story. The dog you loved and woke to for fifteen years is long gone, along with her smell and the sensation of her fur against your cheek.

Perfume, for me, I realized, extends those blips into lifelong memories, which live on indefinitely in the mind. I only went to LA several months ago, but this weekend I smelled Chanel Cuir De Russie, which I bought there, and already it smells like that whole trip to me: the insecurities I felt showing my film for the first time, coupled with the wonder of being in that weird, magical and merciless place. Perfume brought every complicated emotion back to me with visceral economy. Nothing else has the ability to do that with such facility. Maybe it has to do with the fact that perfume itself is so complicated and hard to pin down. Perfume itself is tangled emotion and wonder, sadness and beauty and beatitude all mixed together. The smell of violets isn't simply floral but ancestral for me. Violets are my grandmother, conjuring every last detail of her memory. Fragrance has the power to bring the dead back to life. It changes things, alters the course of time, penetrates the mind and the mood.

Meeting Abigail in The Perfume Critic chat room was important for me. Starting this blog extended the conversation I began at the Perfume House in Portland, bringing it into the outside world. We talk almost every day, several times a day. We meet on the blog to share our impressions and all those complicated feelings. We share perfume and the stories behind them with each other. And all those conversations are peppered with everything else going on in our individual day to day lives. When I talked to Abigail on the phone the first time, after we'd known each other a couple of months and been blogging that time, it was like walking into the Perfume House again. I didn't want to hang up. We talked so easily, more easily than most people I've known ten times as long. The things I'd worked so hard to hide or downplay in conversation with others were matter of fact between us, and I talked like someone's hand had been muffling me all this time.

I can't imagine talking about perfume without Abigail being by my side in the discussion. Together, we've left the Perfume House and taken it out onto the street, continuing the conversation in public. Funny thing, that. Once you start talking on the street you draw others who are having their own conversations. Ours eventually started getting responses from the people reading us, and we continue (avidly) reading other people. Perfume: The Guide was indispensable. IS indispensable. Turin and Sanchez are real advocates, deepening the exchange of perfume between self and the larger world, chief proponents of the right to opinion and passion when talking about it and sharing it, defending it or dismissing it. All the reference lists on various perfume blogs were key, too. I printed them all out and carried the phone book-sized lot around with me, studying as if cramming for an exam. I wanted to know perfume inside and out. I still do. All the perfumers, all the companies, all the ingredients, accords, terms, all the history. I have the feeling there's no going back for me now, and despite all the wonderful things that have happened for me this year with my work and in my personal life, my initiation into perfume and the open embrace of that long-forbidden pleasure stands alone as a singular achievement.

Below are flashbacks from the year for me, some of the moments which come most readily to mind:

-Walking into Chanel in Beverly Hills, where the first thing I saw was a row of Les Exclusifs. I came for Cuir de Russie but they were out. I was the only one in the crowded store looking at perfume, and the sales force seemed perplexed by my insistence and questions. Wasn't there someone in my life who might like a nice quilted purse?

-Traveling across the country for work allowed me to visit perfume shops and department stores I don't have access to at home, and often I was much more preoccupied with tracking down bottles of juice than the real reason for being in town. I visited Nordstrom and Parfumerie Nasreen in Seattle, Barneys and Etro and LuckyScent in LA, Barneys in Chicago, Fena Fresh in Greece. My favorite is still the Perfume House, though it doesn't have many of the lines I look for.

-I shopped online a lot. Nothing compares to the excitement of opening a package you've been waiting for. Will it disappoint? Will it exceed expectations? I've experienced both and everything in between, from the let down of Comme des Garcons 2 Man (poor longevity) to the thrill and surprise wallop of Rien and Jasmine et Cigarettes.

-Reading the Guide for the first time made the whole world stop for me. I couldn't hear or see anything else.

-Buying every last perfume I ever smelled in my stepmother's bathroom, including all the Estee Lauders and Coco.

-The constant adjustment my sensibility has gone through regarding gender lines and designations when it comes to perfume. What once seemed unspeakably feminine to me now registers as totally androgynous. What once seemed impossibly butch is now passably femme.

-I spent all year trying to find several perfumes. I ordered Chaos for a friend when it finally came out again and was a little more affordable. In the meantime, during my search, I came across DK Signature, which caught me off guard and turned out to be one of my favorite purchases. I looked everywhere for Lancome Cuir. Even the Lancome reps seemed never to have heard of it. It finally became available on Parfum1, and I love it.

-I ended the year buying five Ava Luxe fragrances and Breath of God from B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful.

Thanks to Perfume Shrine for involving us in this project. See also:

Perfume Shrine
Ars Aromatica
A Rose Beyond the Thames
Bittergrace Notes
Grain de Musc
Legerdenez
Notes from the Ledge
Olfactarama
Savvy Thinker
The Non Blonde
Tuilleries
1000 Fragrances