Scents have a way of eliciting daydreams of the past, at least that’s the case for me.
I swam competitively for a long time. The smell of chlorine brings me back to high school and college with images of me chatting with friends as our arms rested on kickboards, mere seconds away from being yelled at by the coach for talking too much.
The smell that comes off of a hot pan right after a pancake is flipped reminds me of visiting my great grandparents in Burbank. My great grandpa would always make pancakes when we visited.
The smell of horses brings me back to my childhood dream of becoming a jockey as I sat too close to the TV watching National Velvet over and over.
Banana Boat tanning lotions smell like surfing at Old Man’s in San Onofre during college.
Fruit Roll-Ups smell like Little League practice.
Pink Sugar perfume reminds me of the evidence vault in the Secret Service’s Los Angeles Field Office because the evidence custodian, Melissa, wore it every day.
No smelly memory is more potent, however, than the memory of my grandma and her perfumes. “Mema” loved perfumes, and I smile at the thought of her dousing herself with perfume every day. She was not a one-spritz-on-the-wrist kind of woman. She was a spritz-here-spritz-there-and-everywhere kind of spritzer of perfume. Four or five spritzes at least. Shockingly, those scents were never overpowering. It always seemed like just the right amount of noticeable and pleasant.
She worked hard and didn’t mind working up a sweat. But no matter what she was doing, though, she always smelled good.
I definitely inherited my love of perfume from her. I loved visiting department stores with her as a kid because we’d inevitably find ourselves testing out fragrances of all kinds. To this day, the scent of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door takes me back to those glass trays with a mirrored base that held the sample perfume bottles at the mall. I can see Mema’s closed eyes as she spritzed with her eyes closed, savoring the scents.
“Oh, that one is good,” she’d say, fanning her hands toward her face to absorb the scent.
“Mema, try this one. This one has a pretty bottle!” I, of course, already reeked of the “pretty bottle” scent. Only Mema could get away with four aggressive spritzes. She’d take the bottle and spritz her wrist this time. She’d give the scent a few seconds to absorb and then raise her wrist to her nose.
By the time we’d pry ourselves away from the pretty bottles, the patchouli, vanilla, and floral aromas were doused all over wrists, necks, and clothes.
My love of perfume hasn’t dwindled with time. I’m acquiring quite a collection of perfumes, if I do say so myself.
I’ve been wearing Miracle by Lancome since college. It’s by far my favorite scent. For a while in college, I wore a Ralph Lauren perfume (because I liked the blue bottle… shocker), but a college friend who wore Miracle also liked it. After a while, I think we just traded bottles because we like the other’s better. Miracle masked the never-ending stench of chlorine.
I also went through an Abercrombie 8 perfume phase in college. Abercrombie was “the” denim brand (next to Hollister) of the time. Merely entering the store still gives me a headache, but the scent is more of a guilty pleasure because I remember those big Abercrombie bags with the buff models on them. If you cut the bags just right, they’d become a poster. My dorm room had a few of those on the walls.
As a Secret Service agent, I almost always wore Victoria’s Secret Warm and Cozy body mist. When I smell it, I can still picture going on search warrants with coworkers and someone saying, “What smells so good?” and another person pointing at me.
Today I buy a perfume when I visit a new city or take on a new adventure. That smell is supposed to elicit a memory of that adventure. I cannot claim this idea as my own. I’m pretty sure I found it on Pinterest at some point or another.
This new habit first started when I moved into my Los Angeles apartment right after I left the Secret Service and sold my house. I bought the new Chanel No. 5 perfume called Chanel No. 5 L’eau. It was supposed to symbolize a new beginning and starting over. It’s my “Los Angeles scent.”
When I bought the Chanel perfume, the store put a couple samples in the bag as I left. One of those samples was the Hermes Le Jardin de Monsieur Li perfume. I took the sample to Brooklyn, New York when I visited to run a half marathon. I had a lot of fun exploring a new place that long weekend, so I bought the perfume when I got home.
I looked into moving to Fort Lauderdale at one point. I was hurting a lot at the time and thought a new coast and a new city might be what I needed. On a condo-hunting trip, I went to a mall and walked right up to one of the perfume counters and told the gentleman manning it that I wanted a perfume that smelled like Florida. I told him about my perfume habit, and he was quite excited to help me find the right one. Most of the scents he showed me had citrus undertones, but when he handed me Creed’s Virgin Island Water, I knew I’d found “the one.” It’s a unisex scent and was, most definitely, the most expensive perfume I’d sampled that day (darn it). But just like the new Chanel No.5, I wanted a fresh start, and this sexy perfume was going to remind me of it.
I didn’t end up moving to Fort Lauderdale, but I still love that perfume because it reminds me of a time when I was doing a lot of soul searching and finally willing to make more big changes to be better and get better.
When Mema passed away, someone (probably my mom or aunt) gave me Mema’s most recent perfume bottle. I don’t know who gave it to her or if she bought it herself, but it’s a red bottle of Christian Audigier’s women’s perfume. It’s the last smell I remember on her. It sits in the middle of my collection in honor of her.
Mema enjoyed her perfumes and she didn’t hide it. People (me, especially) remember her for it. She didn’t reduce her spritzes because people thought it was funny how aggressively she sprayed herself every day. She didn’t always wear what was popular or new. She wore what she liked and wore it liberally.
People remember the smells. They remember how smells made them feel. They remember how the people wearing them made them feel. Just like perfumes make me feel a certain way or remember something from the past, it really is more about the people or situations behind the scents that matter most.
I hope (and want) my “scents” to bring positive and empowering vibes. I want memories of me and interactions with me to elicit thoughts of kindness and love. I want to spritz that stuff everywhere.
This week, I’m telling myself this:
Don’t be a one-spritz-on-the-wrist kind of person when four or five spritzes makes you and others happy.
As the Maya Angelou quote goes, “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”
Spritzing and embracing the typos till next week,
Mel