What Are You Wearing?? By: Nicole Lockhart
The stories behind her favorite perfume scents and other thoughts about what you smell like. My mother no longer wears perfume. She complains they give her headaches. But perhaps she has just been abused like the millions of other men and women, hounded down in department stores with little regard for personal space and callously spritzed with the latest eau du toilette (Yes, that means toilet water in French). That scent follows us home, lingers around us on our clothes and immortalized in the unshowerable parts of our pores. There is, we begin to believe, a possibility the stench never goes away and will haunt forever. And then, by plot twist, it grows on us. So we go back to the department store to try it on, only to find that it is no longer on sale and we still in fact hate it. In a way, the inability to find a fragrance that we don’t mind being covered in for the day may seem like we have commitment issues. But we are all searching for that whiff of love, knowing it is not easily found at first spray. When she did wear perfume, my mother chose Clinique’s “Happy”. A soft citrus scent that wandered around with her like a sunny day in a country garden. It was the kind of smell my nine year old self associated with the quiet joys of reading a book under her arm, or playing on the carpeted floors of her bathroom while watching her primp as she prepared for a night out with my father. As a good mother does, she let me try it on once or twice. When the mist swirled around me like an angel’s breath I became ankew. The transformation still happens when I smell the now classic perfume, still sold in Macy’s or any remaining department stores. It tethers me to the memories of my happy childhood and to the desire to grow-up and be the kind of woman my mother projected when she wore her signature scent. I used to steal that perfume from her counter and take it to school, spraying myself with its confidence boosting contents in-between classes. By the time I got to highschool I was obsessed with finding the perfect signature scent for myself. I wanted to wear something that projected who I was without even speaking for myself. I wanted a fragrance so attuned to my being that when I would walk by, the heads would turn, and people would know that I was here. In a recent conversation with bespoke perfume creator Sue Phillips, owner of The Scentarium a make-your-own parfumerie located in TriBeCa, I marveled that my sense of smell was the only one of my senses I couldn’t turn off. To stop smelling, I would have to stop breathing. “I spent years,” I explained to Phillips a fragrance verteran with over 35 years in the industry, “following my curiosity for smells.” I was always penning them in my 15
