The Memory of Scent

Each of us has our own aromatic memory.

The romantic French writer, Gustave Flaubert describes smelling his lover’s slippers, which he kept nearby in his desk drawer. While my olfactory memories of lover’s shoes are considerably less evocative, it is impossible to ignore the vast amounts of literature that is laden with scent; the memories it evokes are emotional ones, bringing us back in time. Our sense of smell is the most primitive of our senses and remains the most mysterious. Scent is closely linked to recognizance and remembrance, and we are able to store some 10,000 multifarious ones in our "scent memory."

I have my own recollections of sitting in a synagogue during a particularly long Bar Mitzvah service and discovering the poem, ‘The Song of Solomon’ in the Book of Psalms. It is a sensual love story crafted in the desert around perfumes and body scents; one can feel the parched landscape of the Middle East where this story is revealed,  “…the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

This would make those Saturday services bearable, and it would get a bit warm at my end of the sanctuary. It supposes that the most persuasive evidence for the effects of aroma on us is key in our choice of potential mates, not unlike the bees beguiled into trying to mate with flowers, by a pheromone-charged scent. Nowhere is this more evident that in Michael Ondaatje’s stirring poem chronicling the unrequited love of a man, who is a cinnamon peeler in India,

     “You touched

       your belly to my hands

      in the dry air and said

      I am the cinnamon

      peeler’s wife. Smell me.”

My jaw dropped. Smell me indeed! Leading perfume expert Roja Dove states, ‘A photograph is cold, two dimensional, and in time will fade; a perfume brings back moments in our lives in vivid, glorious technicolor. Nothing but perfume is able to transport us in this way – a single drop of scent can take us from the mundane to a temporal world of fantasy and escapism.’

As women, we can all recall our own ‘coming-of-age’ perfume. Our first voyages into love, that sexy but oh-so-wrong boy we rolled under the covers with (who is still beneath our bed) brought back to life by a whiff of that perfume and a smile. Our choice of fragrance changes with that messy relationship we stayed in for way too long and finally, the one who captures our hearts and loves the way we smell. Or in my case, the olfactory accompaniment that reminds me of my strength and sensuality; although currently loverless, swaddled in the scent of my perfume with my daughter lying like a starfish in my bed.

Original Draft of a story commissioned by Thierry Mugler.

Photography: The immensely talented Chris Cramer http://www.chriscraymer.com/