Where Did Your Love of Fragrances Begin? A Journey Begins

My father always wore colognes and I use to spray on his colognes as a child (after he went to work). Might have been curious but not crazy. I was the best smelling kid in grade school. The teachers always complimented me. Just got use to wearing fragrances after that.

I have always had a perfume since my early teenage days and a thorough interest in essential oils. However, my bridge to fine fragrances was Le Male and someone mentioning a similarity to Chergui (there is none IMO). I bought a travel spray of Ambre Sultan and a used bottle of Chergui blind. That sealed the fate!

As a teenager with long hair and tie-dyed t-shirts, I wore various essential oils.
When I cut my locks in my early 20s, I was gifted a bottle of Acqua di Gio one Christmas and wore that for a couple of years.
Then, four or five years ago, I started dating a girl in Paris. I decided I ought to spruce myself up a little. I started researching perfumes and a little while after came across Basenotes. The relationship didn't last (the girl rent my heart asunder and threw the scraps in the Seine), but my interest in fragrance continued...

1995 at Magasin du Nord in Lyngby, just north of Copenhagen.
I was 15. Asked the SA for a sweet, heavy perfume for men.
She suggested Égoïste, and I was sold. Bought it and has been
buying it ever since. From then on I was a perfumista.

I've always had a keen sense of smell...which has had downsides (I don't eat certain things (e.g. fish) because I don't care for the smell (but I so wish I could eat fish...perhaps my body is telling me I'm allergic to it?) and upsides (e.g. I made perfumes as a child...crushing violets into glass vials and setting them into a dark space for a while to mature, making citrus colognes, etc). I have memories of scents from nature that I loved as a child (horses, saddle leather, hay, certain woods, wild flowers, dirt, wet stones, to name a few). Then, as a teenager and beyond as I had the ability to earn money, I started to buy fragrances...and the rest is history.

Probably smelling the fragrances on my mothers nightstand (Norell, Jontue, Chantilly, Opium...) and then being fascinated by the fragrances at the Estée Lauder counter shopping with my aunt (who wore Private Collection).

I too have always had a keen sense of smell (and a large nose to
go with it!) My father was a pharmacist and I remember helping him
make home-made hand cream and sniffing the scents he sold in his
shop. My favourite smells as a child were saddle leather (I rode horses)
hay, cinnamon, bonfires (I was a Girl Guide!),rice pudding and sweet peas.

When I was a teenager I bought my first perfumes: Aqua Manda (where are you now?)
Anais Anais, Jontue and Havoc.
Later on my sister bought me some Jicky and my love affair with Guerlain began.
A year in France (1975/6) introduced me to many more scents: Casaque, Jolie Madame,
Mitsouko and Rive Gauche. The journey had begun in earnest......

It was my mother's Jean Patou Joy. The scent immediately evokes memories of childhood. She also wore Zen, but less frequently. My serious interest in fragrance began in Bible class. After reading from the Bible, the priest spoke about rose oil and how it is extracted from thousands of rose petals. I think I must have been 9 years old. I went home, gathered all the rose petals I could find in our garden and tried to extract oil from it. My grandmother was perturbed to say the least. Seeing how interested in perfume I became, my father brought back a little bottle of Bal a Versailles from Paris. A very grown up fragrance and it felt wrong to wear it then, but I was mesmerised by it. I couldn't wear it until I was well into my late 20s.

It could be my mother's garden. We had white flowers, especially gardenia and jasmine sambac. There were three dates trees, blossomed in late April and early May.
Or, my uncle's mandarin orchard. I loved the scent of organge blossom in Spring and the juicy smell of fruits in Autumn.
Or, my best friend's yard in May, fragrant roses climbing all over the fence
Or, a trip to the nearby tea plantation
....

I can't remember a time when I didn't love either perfumes or the smell of flowers.

We had a very fragrant yard, with a profusion of flowers: lilac bushes along our back fence, carnations lining the driveway, roses on 3 sides of the house, lilies of the valley, peonies and honeysuckle vines. Vases of cut flowers in the house were commonplace.

My godmother, who sold Avon, would sometimes give me the little cream sachet jars while I was still in elementary school-- and not just the scents aimed at children. My grandmother gave me Tabu before I was 10! Whenever I visited the department store where my father worked as a tailor, I lingered at the perfume counters, sniffing. My first perfume purchases from my own allowance were made there.

Fragrance has always been a part of my life, something I've always appreciated and would always go out of my way to experience. In addition to the magnolias, gardenias, jasmine, honeysuckle and sweet-olives already growing almost wild everywhere around here, my mother was/is also a gardener and grower of beautifully perfumed roses, peonies, lilacs and lilies. And she's also quite a perfumista herself (so were my grandmothers, especially my paternal grandmother) so I always had someone to nurture and cultivate my fragrant interests. But it wasn't just beautiful perfumes that fascinated me, but food and furniture, and animals, and lakes and swamps and oceans, books and new ballet shoes and art supplies and cigars and the whole outdoors just before and after a cooling rain on a sweltering day. Restaurants, candy shops, bakeries, department stores and hair salons. Makeup. Old buildings and new cars and plastic beach toys and new tennis balls. Easter baskets, church. My grandmother's pantry and my grandfather's art studio. I found something interesting to sniff and make note of everywhere we went ...still do.

Pardon my laziness, but I thought I'd share a bit from my BN profile since I discuss this very thing there -
"I've loved perfume all of my life, literally as far back as I can remember; one of my first memories is of my mother kissing me goodnight before my parents went out for the evening ...a Chanel No5-scented memory. I started my own collection when I was about three years old with Tinkerbell sets and the Avon novelty perfumes for little girls, but I was always aware of "proper" perfumes and I'd get into whatever my perfumista mother had on her vanity, as well as my grandmothers', aunts', family friends' ...all vanities were fair game!

Before too long I wanted and was requesting "real" perfume - I adored minis and especially those varied mini collections that my parents would bring home for me when they traveled. My first "grown-up" perfume I recall loving was Chamade. I was six yrs. old then, and my passion just blossomed from there. I had quite a collection by the time I hit my teens, and it's been growing and evolving ever since."


Thanks for posting this thread, southerngardens - I'm really enjoying reading all the responses.

Well, it started with my mother's collection (Je Reviens, Chanel No.5, Bellodgia, Youth Dew) when I was very young in the early 1960's. I especially loved to huff Je Reviens out of that little, blue bottle.

I'm still a bit of a child, and it actually really started with home fragrances for me, perfume oils in the evenings really calmed me when I was younger. I've played around with my mother's Montana Parfum de Peau, which really intrigued me, and this is a really exciting (but expensive for my high school wallet!) journey (:

I dumped a bottle of my mother's perfume (most likely Chanel No. 5 extrait) on myself as a baby and was rushed to the emergency room covered in hives. Obviously, the experience did not cure me of my interest in fragrance.

You must've smelled wonderful though. I once drank a bit of my mother's perfume when I was about 4 y.o.; my reasoning was that if it smelled good then it would taste good, too. It tasted bad!

LOL! Baptized in scent! Can I get a witness?!! Love it.

My mother didn't wear much fragrance, but I always loved the roses we grew and would cut them to put in vases in the house. I remember loving going to the nursery and smelling all the flowers there. Loved the lilac bushes I walked by going to school as a kid. One of my best presents as a teenager was collection of mini bottles of french perfumes that I got for Christmas one year.

Since I was less than 10 years of age. I would use my dads and older brothers fragrances. I always enjoyed layering them and 'experimenting' with fragrances. At 13, I purchased my very own bottle of Pierre Cardin Pour Homme. I was like winning the lottery for me. Ever since, I have enjoyed a love for fragrances that few people can truly appreciate.

My mom used to wear Chanel N°5, which I still remember. I also remember my dad smelling of Old Spice every morning, which I thought was the natural scent of shaving. I was gifted several bottles of fragrance while growing up. I still remember wearing Adidas Moves (a gift from Christmas of 1998) and Tommy (another gift for Christmas a few years later). My first serious fragrance was a bottle of Burberry London for Men, which I received as an anniversary gift from a girlfriend back in 2008. I would say that this ended up sparking my interest in fragrances; a year later I purchased my first fragrance: The Beat for Men, also by Burberry. However, I didn't end up falling down the rabbit hole until I finally ran out of that first bottle of Burberry London for Men in 2011. While searching for a replacement for what was, at the time, my signature scent, I started learning more and more about fragrances and became totally smitten. The rest is history, I suppose.

My dad is probably most responsible for my love of fragrances. Growing up he wore Royal Copenhagen and later transitioned to CK obsession. After that he started to buy a more varied collection of fresh soapy scents. While with him in Salt Lake, we were at a fragrance counter and I came across Marc Jacobs BANG for the first time. It was unlike ANYTHING else in the store! So different and polarizing. After leaving the store, I couldn't get that peppery smell out of my mind. I later bought my own bottle online and after that I started looking into other peppery scents, ordering samples from TPC and LS and the rest is history.

Fragrance is so fascinating! There is SO SO SO much out there, and it's so diverse!!! It's the first hobby that I have not tired of after only a few months. Now it's been years and I am still as hooked as the first year! HOPELESSLY!!!