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What Scent Evokes the Strongest Memories For You?

post #1 of 34
11/12/12 at 3:31pm
Thread Starter 
The original Polo Green reminds me of my college days and being young and free. I look in the mirror now and wonder where the time went!
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post #2 of 34
11/12/12 at 3:39pm
Nina Ricci L'air du Temps, is the one that brings back the most memories. My husband bought it for me on our honeymoon, I was only 19. I wore that one exclusively for several years and it brings back a lot of great memories when I wear it. Of course the L'Air du Temps of today doesn't smell like it used to, but I have a miniature of the original that I'm trying to make last as long as possible.
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post #3 of 34
11/12/12 at 4:06pm
Mine is of course Houbigant Ambergris from the mid 70's... Sunny days sitting around with friends in the sunshine on the green grass. Long flowing golden hair right down the back reaching further than our bums. Fresh faced, dark kohl eyes, pale lips and freckles. No shoes. Primrose yellow hipster bellbottom jeans, all frayed around the bottom. A cream cheesecloth shirt with a tied front showing a flat belly. Bellbottom sleeves with tiny little circular mirrors sewn in the edge embroidery. A yellow hat covered in various badges, one of them a big yellow smiley badge..... we walked everywhere with no shoes on then.... nearly everyone smoked in those days. No cameras or phones then..... good job!
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post #4 of 34
11/12/12 at 4:19pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by mumsy View Post

Mine is of course Houbigant Ambergris from the mid 70's... Sunny days sitting around with friends in the sunshine on the green grass. Long flowing golden hair right down the back reaching further than our bums. Fresh faced, dark kohl eyes, pale lips and freckles. No shoes. Primrose yellow hipster bellbottom jeans, all frayed around the bottom. A cream cheesecloth shirt with a tied front showing a flat belly. Bellbottom sleeves with tiny little circular mirrors sewn in the edge embroidery. A yellow hat covered in various badges, one of them a big yellow smiley badge..... we walked everywhere with no shoes on then.... nearly everyone smoked in those days. No cameras or phones then..... good job!

Great story and well told. Love it Mumsy!
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post #5 of 34
11/12/12 at 5:45pm
It would be Jean Patou Joy for me. It was my mother's fragrance until she lost her sense of smell due to a sinus infection... sad, really. The scent immediately takes me back to my childhood, playing with her makeup and jewellery and how comforting it was when I smelt traces of it on her silk scarves... I kind of wish I could stick to one scent so that my daughter could have a scent associated with me... Then again, how boring would that be, sticking to one scent all your life!? Nevaaah!

I also have other strong scent memories. One of them is Eau D`Orange Verte by Hermes. It was my father's scent and it evokes the excitement I felt of being with him as I associate the scent with his return home from one of his long travels around the world.

I've already mentioned the next and last one in SOTD, but it has to do with YSL Opium. It was the first day of art college and I was late for the life drawing class when I met a fellow student who wore the scent. I was immediately captivated by it and asked her what it was... my lifelong love affair with the scent began there and then. So, whenever I wear Opium, it evokes memories of my first day at college, sat in front of a stark naked male model (full frontal) in broad daylight...
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post #6 of 34
11/12/12 at 7:31pm
the girl who sat next to me in high school chemistry class wore Poison. *chemistry* class. can you believe it?
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post #7 of 34
11/12/12 at 9:04pm
Forever Florals Plumeria. Takes me back to Hawaii and reminds me of my boyfriend every. single. time.
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post #8 of 34
11/12/12 at 9:17pm
Opium
Chanel no 5
Fahrenheit
SMW
CDG 2
A few older Micallefs
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post #9 of 34
11/12/12 at 10:15pm
Coco EdP
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post #10 of 34
11/13/12 at 5:05am
Faberge Babe. Junior High, late 1970s, and everything that went along with the times.
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post #11 of 34
11/13/12 at 5:47am
Scent, but not prefume. I normally can recall everything of a particular day if there is a relatively scent associated with it and I smell that scent again.
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post #12 of 34
11/13/12 at 9:33am
Re: scent it will be (probably always) the smell of freshly polished parquet floors. It is a smell that always takes me somewhere wonderful, no matter where I am in the world. Add a hot summer day to that and my most evocative smell comes into existence.
Alternatively, in winter I like using a wonderful Cire Trudon candle, Roi Soleil (which I believe has now been "reformulated" :-( ).
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post #13 of 34
11/23/12 at 2:06pm
vanilla extract. My family has never used the imitation kind. When I was just a wee one in my mom's kitchen, I noticed that vanilla extract was never measured, just squirted liberally into batter devil-may-care. It is a tradition I uphold. Eau Duelle reminds me of baking, comfort, being recipe-defiant, and glorious excess.
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post #14 of 34
11/23/12 at 2:25pm
Lagerfeld Photo (the original formulation). This is the scent that made me fall in love with perfumes. I first smelled it in the summer of 1992, when I was a sophomore at university. I was captivated by it, as it seemed so bright and so happy. I just recently bought a vintage bottle, and I was in the summer of 1992 all over again.

Also Hermes Rocabar. I was wearing that one a lot as I was finishing my Ph.D. dissertation. It was also around the time when I was reconciling with some family members that I had drifted apart from. That was a very happy time in my life, and the smell of it still brings back those feelings.
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post #15 of 34
11/24/12 at 12:27am
Dior's Eau Sauvage (vintage) reminds me of my first crush.
I still get a lump in my throat when I smell it again.
Summer of '73 kind of thing....
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post #16 of 34
11/24/12 at 8:19am
Avon Skin So Soft reminds me of girl scout camp during the 1980's. We slept in tents and lean-tos; we rose at the crack of dawn to swim in the lake or hike through the forest. The air was always perfumed with various flavors of pine and somehow this seemed to combine with the notorious bath oil to create a heavenly fragrance. Given that I associate this fragrance with one of the best times in my life, I fantasize about putting "Summer of '86" in a bottle.
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post #17 of 34
11/25/12 at 4:56pm
Chanel No. 5 my mother's "getting dressed up" perfume
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post #18 of 34
11/26/12 at 3:49am
Chanel No. 5 evokes the strongest memories for me too, because it brings my mother back to me. It was one of her most favorite perfumes. Too bad I can't wear it, just does smell the same on me as it did on Mama.
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post #19 of 34
11/26/12 at 5:49am
Same here, Theodora. Smells much better on my Mama than it does on me!
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post #20 of 34
11/27/12 at 3:44am
Grey Flannel Geoffrey Beene, that was my Dad's scent, at least the most memorable one. He also wore Eau Sauvage the original one, but I like to wear neither!! My best friend is Le Male, or Patchouly by Reminissence. My love: Aqua di Gio!

My mother wore Chanel 19 when I was just a kid, and later on it was Alliage, for me both connote elegance and feminity. Anais Anais is my aunt, and that for me is a young rebel and very feminine. Another aunt used to wear Youth Dew, that is a classic elegance, and yet another aunt was more adventurous and has worn: Giorgio, Opium, and a lot of the more voluptuous floral-orientals. Very useful to have such diverse memories when you want to be a perfumer!!!

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and my favorite: Vetiver Guerlain, for me is Masculine elegance at it's cleanest and most appealing form.

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and for crushes, I have had a crush on a girl wearing Samsara by Guerlain, and on a boy wearing Escape by Calvin Klein!
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post #21 of 34
12/20/12 at 5:10pm
xxx
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post #22 of 34
12/20/12 at 5:28pm
Balsam fir, pine, anything evergreen. Reminds me of my native state, Michigan. When I first smelled Mitsouko I was reminded of my grandmother's dresser in her bedroom.
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post #23 of 34
12/21/12 at 12:22am
Errrr, that depends on the fragrance! Haha!

Popular mid 90's scents like CK One and Sunflowers etc. make me very irritable and angry. Mostly aquatics - don't like and want to crawl out of my skin.

Coco and Jil Sander no. 4 can almost make me cry on some level as it reminds me of a time when I was younger and had a lot of hope for a better life while living in a broken home. Coco and JS no. 4 matched the older person that was inside me at a young age. These two fragrances answered the call I had in my spirit and let me know I was not alone and that I'd get to a place of knowing myself fully, and be in a place of safety, someday. These fragrances are me as they introduced me to myself on some level. If that makes any sense.
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post #24 of 34
12/21/12 at 7:40am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverdragonfly View Post

Errrr, that depends on the fragrance! Haha!

Popular mid 90's scents like CK One and Sunflowers etc. make me very irritable and angry. Mostly aquatics - don't like and want to crawl out of my skin.

Coco and Jil Sander no. 4 can almost make me cry on some level as it reminds me of a time when I was younger and had a lot of hope for a better life while living in a broken home. Coco and JS no. 4 matched the older person that was inside me at a young age. These two fragrances answered the call I had in my spirit and let me know I was not alone and that I'd get to a place of knowing myself fully, and be in a place of safety, someday. These fragrances are me as they introduced me to myself on some level. If that makes any sense.

That's a touching and honest answer. Thank You!

southerngardens
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post #25 of 34
12/22/12 at 9:02am
Jontue, because it's what my mother wore when I was a small child and it was my first perfume I loved to smell on her. One whiff of it, and it's like my mom is conjured in the air. She also wore Norell, but for some reason Jontue has stronger olfactory memories for me. My mom no longer wears fragrance (allergies)...so of course I miss this.

Also, I am pretty sure that the reason I like Shalimar so much is because my grandmother wore it and her blankets at her house retained some of the smell of it, so when I was a kid and she would let me stay over her house the blankets she would put on my bed had a soft powdery smell to them. I have asked my aunts (her daughters) if she wore Shalimar and they think she did. Makes a lot of sense, because I smell very 'comforted' when I wear it.
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post #26 of 34
1/28/13 at 4:35pm

Kind of an over-the-top memory, but neat that it involved perfume.

I grew up in an environment where fragrances were rare and considered 'special' and men definitely didn't wear them - well, except for motor oil, moose guts, aviation fuel and fish slime.

I met someone who would later become my husband while dog mushing, but it turned out he was an entirely different type of male than I knew before - dog musher and fisherman, yes, but also author, poet, educator, impassioned equal rights activist. You get the picture. He bought me an entire bottle of L'Heure Bleue perfume, and gave it to me, of all places, in an abandoned cannery where we were holed up during a summer storm while taking his fishing boat upriver to his cabin from Bristol Bay after the close of fishing season.

I was stunned - I was 19 and no one had ever given me fragrance, let alone L'Heure Bleue, let alone perfume. It was the most romantic moment of my life until then (actually it was the first) when he pulled the package out of his duffel, where he'd hidden it for weeks, waiting for the right moment.

Except the storm got worse and we looked outside to see what was the largest porcupine we'd ever laid eyes on (large as a 50 gallon drum), so we ran out in the storm to look at it, and everything started to take a surreal turn. The lightning lit up the tundra and the porcupine, froze the old cannery and boats in vignettes of otherworldliness. Being a literature professor, he took off his shirt and quoted King Lear on the moor in the storm "Blow winds blow, crack your cheeks..." I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. Let's just say my brother, father or anyone I grew up with would never do anything remotely like this. We ran back to the cannery, laughing but freezing wet.

We were wrapped in old wool blankets on spruce boughs we put in the bed frame, cold, wet, waiting for our clothes to dry by the wood stove, when he took the perfume bottle of L'Heure Bleue, and upended the entire bottle over both us, pouring it out over our bodies, hair, the blankets, the spruce branches, the floor - too late for me to do anything about it!

But then the smell! It was mesmerizing, a little hypnotic. It started permeating everything. The lightning made the room intermittently light up in blue flashes - the blue hour. The wood stove glowed orange. The room was small, old, falling down, unpainted, plebeian, filling with one of the most amazing fragrances on the planet. It was (to my mind) a fragrance of salons in Paris, far beyond a life I knew, yet it didn't seem out of place in this little room, becoming a moment outside time - how was that possible? It was like it was consecrated. What a thing perfume could do!

When we continued upriver in the rain next day, the fragrance was still very strong - every movement wafted it around us in our slickers. Thank goodness it took the entire day to get to the village, as we only had one set of clothes, no place to shower. Even then, when we got there people could smell us. They joked about it. They said "What's the matter - trying to cut the smell of fish? You tired of smelling like fish slime? Were you bathing in it? You guys want to take a steambath?"

Men and women took communal steambaths separately. The women were first, and the L'Heure Bleue on me filled the room in the heat - the women wanted to know the real story without the men around, so I told them what I could; there was lots of tee-heeing going on at our expense, but we ended up laughing, and they shared some shockingly bawdy stories! Like a pre-spa spa, only with willow switches. As much as the men joked about how the steambath stunk for a month, they got a good laugh out of it because they said Bill smelled like a whore house. The ironic thing - it was the men who asked him the name of the fragrance, because they were going to buy their wives and girlfriends some.

I've often wondered two things:
if that little room was ever visited again by a fisherman trapped in a storm, or if it sat alone and empty, smelling of L'Heure Bleue for years in its solitude; and
if the women in the village wore their L'Heure Bleue only to steambaths or also to festive occasions (though hopefully not while cutting fish).
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post #27 of 34
1/28/13 at 5:16pm
Flathorn, I will never smell L'Heure Blue again without thinking of you. Never.
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post #28 of 34
1/28/13 at 6:12pm
Yeah, I know. I still smile when I think of all the women in the village who were going to get L'Heure Bleue for Christmas, and over-apply and wear it in the most inappropriate circumstances, just because we blew into town, reeking of it in our fishing clothes
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post #29 of 34
1/28/13 at 6:35pm
That is a remarkable story. You told it well. If awards were being given for stories about perfume memories, I would nominate you.
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post #30 of 34
1/28/13 at 7:44pm
Flathorn, that's a wonderful story! I can see why you married him. I imagine there is still a whiff of L'Heure Bleue in that old cannery.
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post #31 of 34
1/28/13 at 7:56pm
Polo Green. Loved it then, continue to love it today.
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post #32 of 34
1/29/13 at 2:36pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Curly11 View Post

That is a remarkable story. You told it well. If awards were being given for stories about perfume memories, I would nominate you.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lilybelle View Post

Flathorn, that's a wonderful story! I can see why you married him. I imagine there is still a whiff of L'Heure Bleue in that old cannery.

Having a large footprint, that would have pleased him. It would be called "The Bill award for most over-the-top fragrance story".
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post #33 of 34
1/30/13 at 3:11am
Thank you Flathorn for the read.

As far as feminine fragrances:
Love Spell will always remind me of my mother.
True Star reminds me of an ex that was a lot of fun; she is the only girl I dated that had a signature frag.

For masculine:
Jazz vintage was given to me by my mother in high school (it was a gift from her to my dad, but he necer wore it.) I only wore it on dates to formal dances, so it always reminds me of carefree days and the preening that went along with it.
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post #34 of 34
1/30/13 at 3:49pm
Miss Dior. It was my grandmother's scent.
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