Musings on Perfume
I try to keep a mental archive of everyone I meet, meticulously filing away soundbites of their voice, the way their hand feels in a handshake, the creases in their face when they smile, but a person’s scent was something I rarely consciously considered in my mental notes. I still remember the slight shock I felt when I first learned that our sense of smell is the most closely connected sense to memory. The fact that a whiff of something could conjure up a whole constellation of vivid long-term memories surprised me—surely a more tangible sense like sight or touch should be the most memorable, I thought to myself. But there’s a reason why we smell the clothes of people we miss, wishing we could bottle up the scent before it fades and carry it with us like a keychain.
I can clearly recall my mom’s organized collection of perfumes lining her vanity and her ritual of spritzing perfume on herself every time before she stepped foot out the front door, even if she were just taking a trip across the street to Trader Joe’s. Her wake of sugar-coated-smelling rose petals would always leave me pondering the purpose of this strange sanctified liquid.
As a young girl, glossy perfume advertisements in magazines with glowing, reposed women in a euphoric trance would possess me into rubbing the peel-open samples around my neck. Perfume makes women irresistibly seductive, they taught me, and who doesn’t want to be irresistibly seductive? It was part of the performance of being a female, the testament of a true Woman, and at age eight that’s what I wanted to be.
It wasn’t until recently that I’ve gained a new perspective on perfumes as an art form. While flicking through an old National Geographic that’s been collecting a thin film of dust on my desk, I came upon an article about perfume craftsmen in Kannauj, “the perfume capital of India” that has been producing sandalwood oil-based botanical perfumes known as attar for more than 400 years. Equally popular amongst men and women alike, attar is a luxurious commodity known as “liquid gold” that takes months of patience to make as it ages in a camel-skin bottle and is then transferred to crystal bottles that line the shelves of bazaars.
Used in the Islamic world for religious rituals to attract divine protection, in East Asia and Europe for cosmetic purposes with perfumed gloves and hair, and for medicinal beliefs as it was mixed with ingredients that were akin to a witches’ brew like a wolf’s liver or oil of a worm, perfume has a richer history than I had originally credited it with.
Based in Versailles is Osmotheque, the world’s largest scent library. Home to over 4,000 different fragrances, 800 of which are no longer made, Osmotheque is the ultimate archive I wish I could store in my head with the scents of every minute and milestone moment in my life.
On the one hand, I feel that if only I could pull the scent of my late father down from a shelf or commission a perfume maker from Kannauj to replicate it, then perhaps I wouldn’t be so afraid of forgetting him. But on the other hand, it’s uncanny trying to immortalize someone no matter how popular it is becoming, what with bringing loved ones back from the dead as a hologram or stuffing their voice recording into a talking teddy bear. I think this kind of manufactured reincarnation would leave me feeling farther away from them than ever before.
A couple of days ago, I was asked over dessert what my biggest fear was and a million different fears popped into my mind, most of them having to do with different ways of dying. But as I sit here and try to remember all of my memories that have significantly faded over time like a temporary tattoo, I realize that I am not scared of death in the traditional sense and that my biggest fear is forgetting and being forgotten. It is in every human’s nature to want to be remembered. After all, most of the decisions we make are driven by our desire to be remembered—perhaps perfumes are simply another tool we use so that we are not so easily forgotten.
