Base Notes: Scent Memories and Perfume Trends
Along with touch, one of the first senses to fully develop in utero is smell. For even the moments that preface our birth and early existence, our olfactory system is a reliable compass. Until around the age of eight, when our vision fully develops, the way we grow to understand the world around us is largely through smelling it.
In 2009, ex-Gucci creative director and burgeoning perfume personality Tom Ford self-funded A Single Man—his first foray into film, whose grief-stricken protagonist grapples with the sudden loss of his partner. Ford’s visual portrayal of scent-recall as a means to harness smell as a narrative tool romanticizes our everyday experience of scent-memory. Each time our haunted protagonist George’s recall is jarred by a smell, desaturated scenes are infused with a Venusian pulse of color, his disenchantment with existence antagonized by his emotional attachment to the splendor of life, repressed moments evoked by the smoky-wood aroma of a mantle, the herbaceous bitterness of Tanqueray, Arpege on a mohair knit, the warmth of a fox terrier’s forehead—“like buttered toast,” he says.
While highly glamorised, these Proustian moments are not exclusive to cinema—we experience them every day. The basenotes of our fragrance memory. Sometimes though it’s not just the smell of a Barbie’s head, petrichor, or new tires that turn your stomach with a sick nostalgia—it’s designer perfumes themselves. We asked four writers to talk fragrance—from signature scents and olfactory trends, to self-discovery and lost loves—and why they’re hard to forget.
