We can’t put our finger on it. My mother and I in her kitchen, trying to remember what perfume smelled divine on her in the early aughts. My grandma’s scent of choice was Shalimar, but my mother says it never smelled the same on her. Eventually, after much searching, we come up with it, another Guerlain classic: Samsara.
Introduced in 1989 and characterized as the first woody fragrance for women, it makes sense for the time in my mother’s life. She would have been 19, riding the bus to Evergreen Plaza with her best friend Cynthia—fresh silk presses flipping around in the wind. I can see her at the perfume counter, spraying her wrists and delicately dabbing them together between giggles. Spending all her hard-earned money from frying fish at Dock’s on the weekends. Jasmine, sandalwood, ylang ylang, a hint of gourmand. All her favorites, all of the notes I associate with her. But my mother is highly seasonal. In winter she’s floral, in summer she’s satsuma, in fall: vanilla. She is as hard to pin down as the perfume was in her memory.
Samsara, one Sanskrit definition meaning “passing through”.
Though not so much a woman really, I learned to be a woman in part through perfume. By passing through a room or a struggle or a lifetime and having a scent linger in your wake. By leaving an imprint on space after you’ve left it.
All my scents are inherited. Be it the honey soap she used on us in the bath as kids, or the rosemary-mint hair mask my aunt used to make herself. Scent-memory is more than recall—it’s a calling up.
Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth in Buddhism and Hinduism.
Literally meaning “wandering.” At the moment, that wandering is happening through memory.
I have taken to jotting from memory in a diary the scents I associate with the people in my orbit. I’ve gotten many of them wrong, but that’s kind of the point. A game of olfactory telephone in which every top, middle, and base note has significance to them and to me. There are some that evade me entirely, like the scent of his skin, which has little to do with the soap he uses, but everything to do with my love for him. I would bottle it if I could. And much of this is time travel, (samsara: cyclical, circular, to go round, to revolve). Pulling things into the present, like the now-discontinued “Flying Fox” shower gel from LUSH, a brand which my mother maintains she was a devotee of before it became cool.
My aunt calls and tells me that when I heal myself, I am healing my loved ones through multiple timelines. I don’t know how I feel about that, but the multiplicity of healing feels, at least, like it hits the mark. If I’m healing me, I’m healing us; I’m healing all the various me’s, too. And sometimes that healing smells like roasted chickpeas as I nourish myself with tenderness and less shame. Sometimes it smells like the licorice-indulgence of the smallest bit of absinthe in the bottom of my glass. Or, feeling vulnerable and having dotted a bit of Florida water near my heart, my friend remarking as I get into his car that I “smell like Christmas.”
When I worked at LUSH in college, I would come home doused in a combination of every scent in the store—my car hotboxed with lactonic vanilla and coffee and cassis and verbena and cocoa butter. Some people can’t even walk past the store due to the overwhelm of the smell. But the headiness was a delight for me. Recently, I found two perfumes that when combined (the ratio is delicate) smell just like “Flying Fox”. And I’m there. I’m 15 sneaking to use my mom’s shower so that I could experiment with concoctions before school: feeling grown, radiating jasmine.