Small Moments of Scent: Easter
My long weekend smells of girl sweat, Mini Eggs and a manspreading garden weed
This is a mini-series called Small Moments of Scent, in which I share as a perfumer, the everyday, seasonal smells that locate me throughout the year.
So far, I’ve written about mimosa, blood orange, cherry chapstick and a £3 paper incense I stock up on in French pharmacies. I hope to highlight how nuanced an ordinary smell can be if you take the time to sit with the notes.
I hope to encourage you to stop, breathe deeply, consider something you know well, with a new awareness, and then carry on with your day. These are the scents that located me this week:
Herb Robert
It was not a good smell I encountered last Sunday, but I welcomed it all the same as it meant I was back on my knees, with my hands in the soil on the precipice of a new season in the garden.
Herb Robert is a star-shaped plant that infiltrates the flowerbeds, manspreading its hairy red stalks and taking up space from the surrounding Love-in-a-mist.
If you leave it to grow, pretty pink flowers will come, (it's in the geranium family after all) but it will take everything else down with it.
Gardening books call it an ‘aggressor’ - I’ll attest that, we have a history.
The scent of this showy weed is very distinctive: bitter and vegetal. Like parsley or celery, only more guttural and green. And when it’s wet with rain it turns fousty. I draw a line with my nose to a Victorian house in Hackney in my twenties and a kitchen infested with mice.
A quick internet stalk of my enemy tells me it’s also called ‘Stinky Bob’ and ‘Fox Geranium’ because of its fox-like scent.
Mice, foxes and this plant pest must share some scent DNA. Every smell is made up of millions of molecules that are completely different to each other and come together in a bouquet that we come to recognise as its scent. In isolation some of the molecules are wonderful, and others, not so.
The strangest things like a weed and mice can share some of the same molecules when examined. An interesting example of this is jasmine blossoms and female genitalia, which both have a note called an ‘indole’. That’s why some find the fleshy tones of the overripe white blooms sexy, and others find it funky and cloying.
I have a question in my perfume profile quiz that asks ‘What does sex smell like to you?’ The options are: ‘clean sheets’, ‘guilt’, ‘sweat’ and ‘leather’. How people feel about sensual body notes tells me so much about what perfume notes they will like,or avoid at all costs. It’s not just Gwenyth Paltrow that understands the appeal of a yonic note with her candle: ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’, so too did Napolean Bonaparte, one of history’s most infamous perfume lovers (he carried a bottle of cologne in his boot to battle). In a letter he wrote to his lover Josephine which announced his imminent arrival, he instructed her ‘not to wash’. French Revolution experts agree that he didn’t mean she should leave the dishes.
When I open a bottle of geranium oil, my partner always says he can smell dead animals, having never spent much time around rotting carcases, I don’t make that connection, I love the dry, sweet lemon and rose notes, geranium is clean and fresh for me. One person’s idea of scent heaven is another’s hell. It’s all about context and lived experience. It’s also proof that everything beautiful needs something nasty to give it an edge: like an anchovy stirred into a sauce, or ugly shoes with a pretty dress. Herb Robert might not be a scent recommendation, but it located me in the moment all the same.
Girl Sweat
Did you know we can decipher between the smell of sad and happy sweat?
Perspiration that comes from anxiety and anger smells different to sweat from elation and the release of endorphins. I need more of the latter right now.
Last Saturday after many months (okay, years) of not doing any high-impact exercise I joined a Beyonce-themed dance class. In the cold light of March, we were a group of women in leggings who didn’t know each other, but by the end of the 90 minutes, it felt much more than that.
The teacher instructed us to strut across the room in pairs to Crazy In Love, and line dance to Texas Hold ‘em. My cynical self quickly realised that it would be more embarrassing to be embarrassed, so I followed the lead of the others and just went for it.
Ten minutes later we were whooping and screaming like eleven-year-old girls at a netball match. It was more thrilling than I imagined, and the scent of collective female bodies moving, dancing, and laughing was beautiful and familiar. It reminded me of being in school musicals and the nightclub toilets of my twenties.
As we returned to our Saturdays we felt sweaty, elated and just a tiny bit smug to be women, which, in a world where we are reminded every second of the day of how secondary our needs are, felt wonderful.
Cadbury’s Mini Eggs
I lived in Berlin for seven years and even though Germany is a land built on confectionery: Milka, Kinder, Ritter Sports and the Lindt bunny (from its Swiss neighbour), I found myself craving the pastel pop of a Mini Egg.
So much of our sense of smell and taste is seeped in nostalgia, and for me, the camp vanilla hit of these palm-sized treats is the true taste of Easter.
Just one sniff of the powdered blossom-honey scent takes me to the early light of a childhood bunk bed, I can feel the motion of tucking my icy feet under my little sister for warmth as we gorge on our Easter loot.
Cadbury’s Mini Eggs appear in the UK after Christmas and disappear swiftly after the long weekend. They bring saccharine hope to early spring when you can’t believe you’re still wearing the big coat you’ve had on since November.
The brash yellow bag passed around an office at 4 pm breaks the silence, and sparks conversations about plans for gardens, trips and visiting nieces. They buoy us on towards four heavenly days off.
I’ve always loved Easter, one of the few times in the calendar when things shut down, and there are fewer obligations and plans than the Christmas break.
In a world where we can have everything at all times, Mini Eggs are one of the few seasonal tastes (and smells) that put us in the moment.
Happy long weekend everyone.
Hmmmm, I need an emoji like the Bisto Kids to show how much I appreciated and identified with this article.