Smell You Later
Illustration by Mia Dong
I have a terrible memory. Short-term, long-term and all in between, my brain is on the same three-second countdown as a goldfish. I forget timelines even as they’re happening, scenes slipping away and fading into jumbled tableaus, absent conversations and blurred out faces. I’m constantly in doubt of my facial recognition skills and I can’t remember the names of TV show characters to save my life. I suppose a part of this conundrum is a symptom of age. Life is so repetitive; sleep, eat, work, weekends, repeat.
How are we supposed to remember each walk and drive down the same roads and routes, the same repeating 9-5 schedule? It’s easy to relax into muscle memory, to cede control and simply exist, rather than fighting an overwhelming and constant sense of deja vu. Or perhaps it’s simply never that deep and my lacklustre memory is a symptom of far too many university nights abusing free will and the convenience of close proximity to Mary J’s.
But what I lack in memory, I make up for in my other senses, specifically my sense of smell. After much research (one Google search), I have confidently self-diagnosed myself with Hyperosmia, or a heightened sense of smell. Negative side effects include a striking ability to sniff out disgusting scents a mile away and an unfortunate awareness of other people’s BO in the gym. But on the positive side, I can walk into a room and immediately recognize the smell of dinner at my grandma’s house before I’d even reached a decade old. I catch a whiff of Cloud by Ariana Grande and I’m transported to working long hours mid-COVID, making myself 3 iced lattes a day and surviving off of Kawartha ice cream and breakfast sandwiches from the Starbucks down the street. I can look at my life as a series of smells, a melodic arrangement for my senses, zeroing in on exactly how I felt at a moment in time. I might be left wondering about the specific details, the day, the month, the people present, but when I muse over the artefacts of my discarded perfumes I am brought right back.
Not to bore you with the science, but my research (a second Google search) explained that if your hippocampus deems a certain smell significant, for example in connection to particularly emotional moments, it will file the information and store it indefinitely. Even after decades, scents can bring back memories and the emotional salience of a specific moment in time. Fashion house Maison Margiela takes advantage of this with their perfume brand Replica, dubbed “Memory in a Fragrance”, with each scent associated with a specific time, place, and moment. Current favourite Lazy Sunday Morning is a morning abed in Florence, 2001, described as “soft skin and bed linen”. I’ve never been good at keeping a diary, but my physical collection of near-empty perfume bottles and samples make for a strong stand-in, a time capsule of all my decades past (a whole two decades!)
Strong contenders for my own olfactory highlight reel include the Bath and Body Works’ Rose Water Meringue body mist I most definitely abused in high school. Notes of drinking raspberry Smirnoff out the bottle in somebody’s parents’ basement are prominent, followed by hints of rushing to class after field hockey practice trying to cover the lovely scents of dirt, sweat, and rain.
Crowd pleaser Cloud by Ariana Grande holds accords of what I believed to be 17 year old sophistication, the nicest (and most expensive) perfume I’d bought to date. You’ll catch a whiff of pre-ing in my second year living room with no air-conditioning, followed by a divisive dry down of Stage Rage and skipping class.
When I close my eyes to the bittersweetness of Sol de Janeiro’s 62 and 40, I’m transported back to my summer study abroad in Florence, to travelling alone for the first time and the overwhelming joy of splitting bottles of wine over fresh pasta. Posso avere un cappuccino di soia per favore? (my signature line.)
Considering myself grown and mature (the big age of 22), I made a priority out of upping my perfume game in recent years, resulting in an amalgamation of 2ml samples that take me right back to the ups and downs of fourth year. A distorted combination of Kayali scents are class at The Grad Club, debating anarchist politics over a beer with the professor (was this allowed?), followed by long hours in a Stauffer study room. Replica’s Jazz club smells like a night out at Ale and giving up after an hour in line for Trin. YSL Libre smells like a long-awaited trip to Europe with my housemates, like ambling through Paris museums and getting ready in a Barcelona Airbnb before my birthday dinner.
This past year will always smell like Burberry Goddess and Kayali Yum Pistachio Gelato, of long days hanging out in the CoGro office and long nights editing MUSE articles. Like Sunday mornings spent in Balzac’s and Sunday nights watching Vanderpump Rules with my housemate. Top notes include the Eras tour and there’s a beautiful dry down of hitting closing time at The Mansion with a pitcher of Jule Aid.
I admit, I’ve become a little bit obsessive with curating the future of my internal diary of fragranced memories. I’ve got quite the collection of contenders to sample for Summer 2025. Maybe this time next year I’ll reflect on Phlur’s Father Figure reminding me of summer in the suburbs. Maybe Replica’s Beach Walk will take me back to a June graduation, of the anxiety of unemployment in a post-grad world. Jo Malone’s Beach Blossom might hold top notes of 3 days in Seville with a dry down of a week in Nice with old friends.
One day I’ll take my kids through my collection. Maybe one of them will pick up a perfume, decide it’s their new signature scent, and the cycle will begin again. A moment is more than your memory, it’s a collection of senses and the emotional reaction you have to them, from the feelings on your fingertips to the taste on your tongue, and of course the fragrances that waft and circle around us. If you take a second to notice, the world will build the time capsule for you.
What will this moment smell like to you? What does it feel like? Are you paying attention?
