Scents and Sensibility

Which, incidentally, is Nectarine Blossom & Honey. “I’m a diehard,” she says. Years, months, and seasons have come and gone for Kira, but through it all Nectarine Blossom & Honey has remained, with its top notes of sweet cassis and its warm acacia-honey heart, fruity peach base, and resonance of vetiver. Nectarine Blossom & Honey, through the good times and the bad. Oh, to know thyself so.

I fumble with the vials, grasping ignorantly at familiar words—peony, yes, we’ve met before, and oh, sage, I see you there! “It’s all about how fragrances make you feel,” Kira says. To begin identifying this, she matches personalities with those of the oils, aided by handy cards offering flowery, enigmatic adjectives that describe each scent. Are you the unflustered mellow of English Pear & Freesia? Or dewy and luminous like the Wild Bluebell? At Jo Malone London, each scent features one or two specific oils—like a flower, fruit, spice, or wood—making for an apothecary-like, encyclopedic catalogue of offerings. Pomegranate, cedarwood, lavender, basil … the list goes on.

But of this vast, crystal-encased garden: Who am I? While the smell is divine, I certainly don’t see myself as “luxurious and opulent” like Peony & Blush Suede. As much as I keep sniffing at Earl Grey & Cucumber, I am not sure if I am “reviving and refined” either. Is my scent the scent my gut responded to, my visceral soul mate? Or is it a cognitive match, one thought carefully through? Am I trying to reject my learned associations—the geographic evocations of orange blossom, the masculine comparisons of tobacco, the festive, holiday warmth of cinnamon? Or am I embracing them?

I take to the internet for answers. According to perfumer Barnabé Fillion—the mind behind some of Aēsop’s most brilliantly alluring fragrances—perfume is about being in the moment and not thinking too much about it, or so he told fragrance website We Wear Perfume.

“I feel like Aēsop generally has very meaningful intention in everything they do,” agrees Aēsop shopkeeper Monica. She has a tousled, dark lob, wears a charcoal cardigan, and sports Doc Martens. There’s an edge to her, but also an unpolished, bohemian air. Her scents, she says, change with her moods. She tends to favor the dark drama of the Hwyl eau de parfum, with its smokiness and cypress, to the airiness of Tacit—but bounces between them when she sees fit, layering fragrances and even brands when the whim strikes. She wears her perfume the way Penny Lane lives her live in Almost Famous: instinctively, stylishly, unconventionally, and with great emotion.

Is my perfume, then, who I want to be, which is wild like the fiery Moroccan sunset, replete with sharp, evocative spices, embodied in the Aēsop scent Marrakech? Or is my scent who I truly am, like Hwyl: fixed and rooted, introspective and internalizing; a moss-covered temple, an ancient forest, sitting silent for hundreds of years.

If it takes a lifetime to define who one is, it takes two to find the scent to embody it.

At Saks Fifth Avenue’s Tom Ford counter, I encounter the widest, most interesting range of scents. Sales associate Angel points me toward celebrity signatures: Drake’s Tuscan Leather and the Tobacco Vanille that was once worn by both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “On a man, the tobacco comes out; on a woman, the vanilla,” she says.

The flasks are mini-luxuries. On the far left, a gradient of deep blue and aquamarine bottles bear the names and scents of grand Mediterranean vacation destinations and give off hints of exotic citruses and the sea. Opaque black bottles to the right house the coffee-laced Café Rose and moody Plum Japonais. And, of course, Oud Wood—God, do the perfumers of the world love oud, that richly scented fragrance reminiscent of the Middle East, which smells like something the three kings would have set at baby Jesus’ feet.

Angel layers Soleil Blanc and Orchid Soleil on me, her own go-to blend. I am caught off-guard by the fragrances of Tom Ford. His idea of the sun, apparently, is less a blazing yellow heat than it is an enduring amber. His orchid is less a conservatory’s thick curtain of flowers and more a single stem, nodding in a bud vase, sitting in a window on some lazy mid-morning.

I wear the mixture out of the store, head over heels in love, until the moment I lose it. Suddenly, the Tom Ford fragrances are indistinguishable, mixed up with every other odor hanging about—a dash of Oud Minérale on my purse, perhaps, or that Soleil di Positano I spritzed. The infatuation is over, replaced by unfaithful thoughts: Remember Aēsop’s Hwyl? Remember how unplaceable, how elusive it was? What about Jo Malone’s Orris and Sandalwood? That “compelling” duo of earthy expressions, made from the root of the violet?

“Sometimes,” says Kira, “scents choose the person.”