IN EVERY NOTE

A FRAGRANCE CAN FEEL LIKE A MEMORY BOTTLED—BUT OUR RECALL IS EVER-SHIFTING. WHY ARE WE CONDITIONED TO LINK THE TWO?

By Arabelle Sicardi

Perfumes, it is sometimes said, are armchair travel: They evoke a place, a time, a moment that may be real or imagined, drawing a smile or a sense of bittersweet nostalgia or longing, even dread. Whatever the response, it’s an ancient one linked to the most primitive parts of our brains. Scientists actually call it the rhinencephalon, or nosebrain, because of how closely smell is linked to the bare essentials of our animal selves. It begs the question: If our bodies’ responses to smell are so instinctual, are there any that are universal? The grand unifier of sniff-knowledge? Is there a collectively agreed upon scent that stands for something specific, formulated, or created purely by Mother Nature? Where does animal instinct end and cultural conditioning start? There are so many perfumes in the world, and yet so many of us share the same mass-produced favorites. What do they say about us, and what memories do these perfumes hold, suspended in their formulations?

These are huge questions, with answers that are far less straightforward than the questions themselves. This is in part because the memories we associate specific scents with are not static monuments of reference. “Memory is an ever-shifting sand. Our experiences change as we retell and rethink them. So it’s interesting that we link stable formulas—fragrances—to memories, which shapeshift,” observes perfume historian Jessica Murphy.

Memories, as Northwestern University scientists found in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, are like a game of telephone. Every time you remember something, your brain network changes. Donna Bridge, the lead author of the study, explains it like so: “Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false.” We are unreliable narrators of our own experiences, so perhaps it isn’t strange that we reach for ephemera like fragrance as evidence. As fragrances degrade over time due to heat or poor storage, the memories we have associated with them degrade, too. I suppose our losses are synchronized.

Knowing that memories and fragrances change often, either in their retellings or reformulations, how do we recognize popular perfumes and link them to places or memories? That, too, is not a guaranteed collective experience. “There is a difference between a scent that is evocative and a scent that takes you somewhere,” muses Noah Virgile, the perfumer behind Amphora Parfum. “Someone might recognize Abercrombie’s Fierce if they stepped into a mall in the early 2000s, but I don’t know that everyone would have an emotional reaction to the scent. You might recognize it blindly and feel like you’re shopping for jeans. But that doesn’t mean there’s emotion attached: It directs you to a place, not always a feeling.”

Perfume may inspire a collective response, but it is rarely the same response—and your reaction to notes may change when they’re paired differently. “When I was formulating my last two scents, I picked ingredients I felt strongly about to work towards an opposing response,” Virgile says. “I put together ingredients I didn’t like to make something I did, and did the exact opposite for the next perfume. I wanted to challenge my own senses. Someone left a review recently where they broke down specific notes they didn’t like that brought up negative memories. I found it so interesting, because those are the exact notes that I find extremely comforting.”

Even as our personal memories linked to fragrances shapeshift, there are formulas whose presence and impact are bigger than our own experiences. “There are generational perfumes, the best-sellers of certain times, like Polo by Ralph Lauren,” recalls Murphy. “For my generation, it was the ambiance of a high school gym and certain dorms and campuses. And my mother, who wears Aramis, remembers every elevator smelling of it in her working days. These collective experiences do happen. I think maybe people will say the 2020s smell like Baccarat Rouge 540.”

Where Le Labo’s Santal 33 embodied a certain era of fashion in 2014—more specifically, the Condé Nast elevator—BCR540 evokes 2020’s it-girl, globetrotter, or influencer who might live in Miami, New York, Dubai, or Los Angeles. It’s the brand’s bestseller by far, its version of Chanel No. 5 or Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium or Calvin Klein’s CK One or Dior’s Poison. These fragrances defined a period, suggesting excess or androgyny or glamour or ’90s cool. Much of their individual success relied (apologies to the perfumer) on the marketing, not the juice. Tens of millions of dollars were spent inundating us with them.

For Poison alone, Dior spent $40 million on the launch globally. In Lizzie Ostrom’s Perfume: A Century of Scents, she writes that it “took on the profile of a viral contagion.” The bet paid off eventually—Poison became a bestseller, spawning riffs that are still sold decades later. It was, in fact, my first obsession with fragrance: I stole my mother’s bottle, charmed by the almond note, a perfumer’s nod to cyanide, a literati’s poison preference. (There is a minuscule amount of cyanide in sweet almonds, but bitter almonds, when ingested, can kill you, as they have done in many detective novels and TV dramas.) That bottle of Poison is now in my refrigerator, a climate-controlled relic of my fragrance origins. I am not a child of the ’80s, when it was initially launched, but I am the daughter of a woman it was made for, and I consider it an inheritance. Every time I wear it, I think of her and all the women who wore it as a declaration that they would not be cowed. When I think of a woman who holds every room the moment she walks in, it is easy to imagine her wearing Poison. It was, for a time, a certain generation’s Aramis, another generation’s Youth Dew. Every generation has a perfume that defines it.

Moving away from formulas and sniffing out nature, the idiosyncrasies of a place’s climate and culture make collective experience a little hard to render homogenous. Rain in Taiwan during monsoon season is different from the much hoped for drizzle in Los Angeles, from the humidity to the ashes and detritus you might find in its droplets. Think of rain like the earth’s atomizer—each droplet contains a huge amount of information. And when we think of bottling a place, how vast is that landscape? A New York summer might smell like the fish markets in Chinatown and the fire hydrants broken open in Harlem, or it might smell like the grass in Central Park, open wine bottles and charcuterie boards, and weed stores throughout the West Village.

Every place is filled with endless iterations of people, places, and experiences: When we imagine a collective, who are we including within it? “We don’t experience scent in isolation. There are a lot of different geographical, class-based, economic, and cultural contexts to note everywhere—there are a lot of different New York summers to capture,” Murphy ruminates.

One exception may be the scent of laundry, though “clean” is a smell that also shapeshifts from region to region. The deodorization and functional fragrances in laundry and cleaning products might be more universal than perfumes—if there’s anything close to the urscent, it would be found in this, the housework of fragrance. The bulk of fragrance research and development funds in olfactory laboratories goes to this unglamorous category; out of the more than $30 billion spent by the flavors and fragrances industry, only 20 percent lies in luxury perfumes. Not everyone can stomach spending hundreds on eau de parfum but we all wear clothes that do, I hope, get laundered. How we deodorize and neutralize odors is a relatively modern compulsion, with a specific palette of utility and context.

The soaps in our kitchens, our bathrooms, and our laundry are the functional fragrances that make up the true bulk of olfactory experience across class and region. Some manufacturers of fragrance materials that sell to both luxury and functional brands have a “slop” category, where remainders of all kinds of materials are thrown. It smells more beautiful than everything else, because it is everything else—in glorious synchronicity. This “slop” is used in store brands worldwide: nameless, considered leftovers, and still resplendent. This slop, the basic DNA of so many soaps around the world, is why almost every perfumer and perfume obsessive I know has a continuously changing ranking of soaps, and we pack local laundry detergents like the most cherished souvenirs on trips anywhere. Myself? I have a box of soaps from Tahiti, Marseille, every hotel I’ve stayed in for years, for this precise reason. They are passport stamps for your senses.

Knowing all this—the ephemerality of memory, the specificity of place—it may not surprise you that more and more people are turning to limited edition runs of fragrances and customization opportunities than ever before. People don’t want to smell like everyone else but vibrantly like themselves. “Even if people aren’t necessarily looking for bespoke fragrances, they’re getting into numbered launches, where there may only be 150 of a perfume produced.” says Virgile. That type of specificity is a huge selling point. It gives people more narrative, an immediate connection, more exposition. Any evidence that something has been given specific attention, like an engraved bottle or a numbered lot, makes a difference. It’s fulfilling people’s desires to self-curate.”

Fragrance workshops are becoming more popular in scent capitals around the world, as are niche perfume stores. There’s Olfactory NYC, where you can make your own custom fragrance with prepared accords, and Capsule Parfumerie in Los Angeles that offers the same service in workshops nearly every weekend. Where weddings once may have had simply an open bar, more and more vendors are offering blend bars, where scent experts guide eventgoers through blending custom scents.

We are always, it seems, chasing a way to capture the ephemeral, even as every retelling changes the shape of the stories we love and miss. But the chase keeps us alive, doesn’t it? And the surprise when we open an old bottle and see how it might have aged alongside us—that is a kind of life lived together, too. So, no, there may not be a universally understood scent. We may not agree on, well, pretty much anything, ever. Our cultural associations and contexts are as varied as we are. But we are changing together, always, and the smells we chase and hope to capture—they do, too. That is a kind of collective life. We can only hope it is well-lived.