Scent crafting

A portal to memory, identity & transformation.

Images via Pinterest.

There is a bottle of Chanel No. 5 that sits on top of the dresser in my office. It’s been in my family for years – a gift given to my mother, who then passed it on to me. The perfume has darkened in colour and, honestly, it probably smells a bit off by now, but I keep it because I’m the kind of sentimental that attaches deep meaning to inanimate objects.

A bottle of Bibliothèque by Byredo sits slightly behind it. This was a surprise from my husband one Christmas, and I adore that he chose a scent for me that’s designed to make you feel like you’re lost in a crumbling, ancient library. I wear it a lot.

Over the last few years, scent is something that’s become really important to me. I am fascinated by how the human brain manages scent and links it to memory. There are complex scent-memory pathways that exist inside us – tiny miracles that jolt our brain into building foundations of memory every time we smell something that makes us feel intensely. Scent becomes a ribbon laced through emotion and recollection. It’s beautiful, really – an incredible architecture designed to make us feel at an even deeper level.

Because of this, scent is a vehicle for memory – something that’s capable of collapsing timelines and allowing us to slip between past and present with a heartbeat.

I’ve started to adore the process of weaving intentionality into my scent choices. This practice began in the run-up to my wedding day. I never, ever intended to get married, but it happened the way all good things in life tend to happen: Unexpectedly, surprisingly, awash with love. Due to my previous feelings about marriage, I wanted it to be special. So I spent three months looking for a scent that could, in my mind, encapsulate everything I was feeling. Chance by Chanel found me.

The bottle – a perfect circle – piqued my interest first. No beginning, no ending. And then that name: Chance. I loved the energy behind it. What is love, if it’s not a chance? It’s a wheel of fortune, forever spinning, and you never know which way the spin will turn, but you go all in anyway. You stumble in, heart lifted in hope, trusting that there’ll always be an upswing at some point (because there’s an upswing in everything) and, ultimately, you know that the risks you play with your heart are truly worth it. Great love or great lesson? Both serve their purpose.

To this day, when I spray some Chance, I see sunlight slanting through tall windows and my husband smiling as he wraps a handfasting cord around our wrists. I feel love bloom inside me, radiant and tangible.

As well as cementing memories, scent also allows us to express ourselves and acts as a calling card. People often remember us based on the scent attached to us.

When I was eighteen and falling (or flailing) into love for the first time, I wore 212 NYC by Carolina Herrera. I no longer wear it. Mostly because it reminds me of my first taste of heartbreak. But for a year or two it was my ‘signature’ scent. I would douse myself in it like I was being baptised. I wrote long love letters to lovers and friends, and I would always spritz it on the paper, ensuring the recipient would smell it because I had seen glamourous women, women I aspired to be, do it on the television and I was easily influenced by the romance of it all.

While scent allows us to express our unique energy and make an impact, my favourite aspect of it is how it can link us to the person we want to become.

Scent offers memory and personality, but it can also shimmer with possibility. It can make us feel a certain way, it can, if we choose wisely, transform us when we put intentionality behind it.

For the last several months, I’ve been deep in a cocoon of healing. My life has become a jagged pizzicato of pain – the type of pain that I struggle to describe in words. Nerve pain. If you’ve experienced it first hand, you know that nothing comes close to verbalising it. The thing with pain, all pain, is that it is profoundly transmutative. You never come out of it the same person you were before it touched you. And I find myself itching, in recent weeks, to mark this metamorphosis with a new scent.

The hunt began.

I started by thinking about how much the last few months have changed me – how they’ve made me both stronger and weaker. I thought about the tender parts of me that ache. I noticed that in my writing and in the reading I’ve done, themes of death and rebirth have shown up repeatedly. I’ve been continually drawing tarot cards that whisper transfiguration – the Ten of Swords, the Tower – all reminding me that by cherishing our pain and our losses, we can be reminded of how good life is, how much there is to savour. How everything is a lesson. Everything.

I ordered some scents and filled my home with a conflicting bouquet of odour – scents that sang, scents that were saccharine and sickly, scents that bathed my office in a tangle of florals.

I quickly realised that I didn’t want to smell sweet or like a summer’s day. No, instead I wanted to smell like something ancient and coarse. I wanted to honour my body as the sacrificial altar, the crucible it has been for the last several months. I wanted – no, needed – something that reflected every step gained and lost. And I realised: I didn’t want to just wear perfume. I wanted to anoint myself.

I wanted to use scent as a way to pay my respects to everything lost and to remind me of my mental and physical ability to rise again, so should I chose. An intention was born and I wanted to declare it boldly, loudly, to scream it and remind myself that: I am holy, even in my suffering.

At my lowest moments, I had spent hours reckoning with my pain, pacing in the early hours of the morning, tears streaming down my face, praying to a god I’ve never believed in. Begging them to take what hurt and dispense healing. Until I realised that no one was coming to help me except myself. That I was the beginning and end of everything. I wanted to smell divine, but in the most blasphemous way possible. An anathema.

And then I found it.

Anubis is the Egyptian god of death and rebirth. A long-standing interest in my life, one of the coolest moments of my life to date was getting to spend time in Egypt, but I digress.

Anubis by Papillon Perfumery is deep amber in the bottle and smells like something ancient, noctilucent and holy. It drips onto the skin, melting in, the heat of your body helping the scent to diffuse. I feel powerful when I wear it. Grounded and centred inside my body and the present moment. It is not a weak scent. It demands that I step up, that I rise to meet it, so to speak.

It is a scent that reminds me all pain is temporary and, better still, all pain is the threshold that leads to deeper understanding and clarity around what really matters.

When I walk, it lingers in the air behind me, not like music, but like voices rising, hypnotic, chanting funerary rites for everything that once was. It is a pyre for this part of my life.

I am transformed into the type of woman I intend to be when I wear it. And I love that.