Small Moments of Scent: Cherry Chapstick

Fruity notes are back, but I don't think I'll take another bite of the cherry this time around

 

‘She’s eating her lip balm!’ Shouts my daughter, as her little sister sinks her baby teeth into the tube of pink petroleum jelly. I should’ve stopped her, but instead, I let her discover one of childhood’s disappointments for herself. 

The Chapstick smells like Calpol and baby dolls: a cutesy sweetness I know well that pricks a memory I can’t quite put my finger on. It makes me feel a little sad and the feeling follows me for days afterwards.

I think about cherries and their cusp-of-youth connotations. Popping your cherry and kissing a girl that tastes like Cherry Chapstick. Cherries are the least serious of all the berries. They’re the national emblem of kitsch: found in kiss-me-quick games arcades and the bosomy print of a Dolce and Gabanna rip-off dress.

Trends come and go in twenty-year cycles. That’s why Beyonce is wearing cowboy boots again, and in perfume: there’s more fruit notes to be found than in 2004’s DKNY Be Delicious.

Perhaps, like the trend for bows in fashion: that’s seen grown women wearing ribbons to the office, our desire to smell juicy is a need for childlike simplicity in a world that's becoming harder to understand.

I'm not ready for this trend to come back, it feels too soon. How is Jean-Claude Ellena’s green mango and grapefruit mastery for Hermes 20 years ago? I still reference those compositions as groundbreaking and new. 

The Chapstick sends me down a cherry-shaped hole searching for the perfect rendition of the trashy note. I head to the Harvey Nichols to find it.
Skulking around perfume departments was something I started to do when my daughters were babies in prams. To leave the house with the intention of smelling a fragrance was enough in those shapeshifting first months: a destination, but crucially I could still be on the move when they woke.
Friends would talk of gallery visits with the ‘NCT lot’, but I couldn't be accountable to others, she was enough. Besides, I was gathering evidence for a perfume brand that I didn’t know back then, I was going to launch later on.
If I was lucky, the baby would still be asleep on the U-Bahn back from West Berlin’s historic department store: KaDeWe, or some concrete concept space in the old East.
A good train ride was spent turning over the scented papers, inhaling them slowly and trying to decipher the notes.  

On this particular perfume pilgrimage, I’m rewarded with Tom Ford’s latest launches: Electric Cherry and Cherry Smoke, adding to the 2018 hit, Lost Cherry. I spray them on the thick paper cards and put them in different pockets of my winter coat before the sales girl breaks the spell. 

Rotating the cards with short, sharp sniffs on an icy train platform, I feel annoyed that they couldn’t edit themselves. Why do we need three? I wanted them to offer the ultimate cherry scent at my feet: the perfect, showy, dirty (it’s Tom Ford, it’s going to be dirty) cherry. I wanted a grown-up answer to a teenage longing. None of the three perfumes says ‘bite me’ enough, they’re all too synthetic and two-dimensional.

What a lot of people don’t know is that when you’re making perfume, you can’t extract cherry (or any of the red berry) notes from nature. 

You can get an orange note or lime the old-fashioned way. Citruses can be essential oils with depth and life that shimmer and change, but whenever you see ‘notes of raspberry and juicy cherry’, you can be sure it’s synthetic.
Perhaps that’s why we’ve learned to accept a neon scent sketch of a cherry that’s nothing like the boozy, tartness of the real thing.

I think about the cherries that I’ve smelt in paper bags in city parks. Cherries with taught skin and fleshy insides that roll across unread newspapers begging to be photographed. They are the ultimate indulgence fruit that signals a hot Saturday with no plans, and someone to have no plans with. 

Then there was the cherry-scented lotion that we all used when we all got sunburnt in the park.
It was in the delicious no-mans-land that fell between handing back the graduation gowns and the lease running out on The Big Shared House. 
We had done the thing we were there to do and were too terrified to think about the next part, so instead we moved in our boyfriends, gay best friends and little sisters from Wales and The North.
In those analogue days, boundaries were as loose as the sash windows that rattled with traffic on Coldharbour Lane. It was the summer the economy crashed, but we didn’t notice as we lay on each other’s beds, bodies and hearts: talking about what we were going to do when our lives began, not knowing that this was our life: those cherry-lotion nights in the weeks in between.

And finally, I can taste the bittersweet freedom in the Fabbri Amarena cherries, heavy with syrup and bourbon at the bottom of an Old Fashioned cocktail. The demi-glacé ones that sit shyly on bar stools, on those first tentative outings without her. (How could you forget the smell of the night air?) The cherries that taste more technicolour than you remember, finding his hand new again without a pram to push. 

This is the first wave of the twenty-year trend cycle that I've ridden as an adult then, and now. Perhaps that’s why music, clothes, and perfume notes are so much heavier.
I feel like I have fallen out of time, memories are looping and syncing. I’m a 19-years-old one day, and then feel older than my 39 years the next.
I watch my daughters, and can vividly recall what it was like to inhabit their bodies. I didn’t have a reference for when they were two or three, it was all new. But I know this part, and what I don’t remember they bring back to me in shuddering blasts: the momentary obsessions, the helter-skelter friendships, the Cherry Chapstick. 

I throw the Tom Ford scent cards away. Perhaps I’ll never find another cherry perfume I like, and I realise I don’t need it, I’ll leave the fruit notes for others to discover and build their stories on. For this part I want my décolletage to smell French like powdery iris. or of danger, and smokey musk.
I’m okay without a second bite of the cherry: for now, there are more notes to try. 

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I've revisited Y2K perfumes, and these are the ones that're worth bringing back