Molly: Signature Scent
For about two years now, I have been really into perfume as a hobby. I know everyone is getting into perfume and converting to Catholicism! I've always been mildly interested in fragrance but I grew up in a "signature scent" mindset. My mom wore Eternity and later Truth by Calvin Klein for years, with an interlude of Burberry Brit.
My first signature scent was Castelbajac. My mom bought it for me at Bergdorf Goodman on my first trip to New York in 2002. I remember the counter and the salesman being in a room that felt magical, as much of Bergdorf's does. Its closed floor plan design can seem like a fairy mansion, where one wrong turn will leave you lost, and rooms seem like they might disappear the moment you leave them. Castelbajac was a little nutty, a little floral - overall light and inoffensive despite the fire engine red packaging. I adored it. I loved looking at the bottle and the special illustrated calendar box that came with it. I loved that it came from New York and that nobody else would have it. Over the years I wore Vera Wang Princess, YSL Parisienne, Dior Hypnotic Poison, V&R Flowebomb, and YSL Black Opium. Extremely basic stuff. I had a few Nest frangrances in my early days in New York but I wore perfume very sporadically and I don't think anyone would have taken note of how I smelled at, eg, work.
In 2019 I was reading an article matching summer books with perfumes and was so taken by the design of the Régime des Fleurs Waves bottle that I went to a boutique in Soho and bought it. A few years later I picked up Floraiku's This July Evening because I couldn't resist the concept and my anniversary, as I never let anyone forget, is Tanabata. I wear it once a year.
I don't remember what triggered my obsession in summer 2023. I was a new mom, so maybe it was just the memetic desire of seeing everyone's beautiful SOTD posts and wanting a small ritual of my own. It's been an ever expanding collection of tins and trinket boxes full of samples, travel sizes and roller pens, and the occasional full bottle ever since. The full bottles that weren't already in my possession are Clue's With the Candlestick, Kerosene's Unknown Pleasures, Universal Flowering's Venus in Tuberose, Milano Fragranze's Panettone, Tokyo Milk's Make Me Blush and Savage Belle, Clue's Dandelion Butter, and Amphora Parfum's Sublimate...mini bottles...that's a different story.
I apply perfume three times a day: in the morning, after I run and shower, and at bedtime. The first two tend to be seasonal with the one I'm wearing most of the day being especially sensitive to the weather, and bedtime is more anything goes and subject to my whims. Wavey Tulip, a scent from the wonderful SYD Botanica, gets so much play from me in the late spring and summer simply because its honeysuckle note performs so beautifully on humid South Carolina days. Right now I am wearing J-Scent's Hanamachi (geisha districts) layered over tuberose body oil. It's the mid-point in a vaguely wanton, slutty themed day with Etat Libre D'orange's Putain des Palaces in the morning. I'm planning to wear Olympic Orchid's Tropic of Capricon tonight, a scent evocative of a tropical vacation where everything is so overripe it's about to rot; real Herzog's jungle monologue vibes. The other day I did a sakura theme for kicks: D'annam's Sakura Snow, Olympic Orchid's Sakura, and J-Scent's Hanamizake.
I suspect I'm still kind of basic. I like white florals, rose, gourmands, and powdery scents. I like By the Fireplace! My best friends share my perfume interest and when the three of us are together, I am most likely to be the one smelling like an actual dessert. Things that I've loved lately include J-Scent's Yawahada, D'annam's Tokyo Nights, Universal FLowering's Rhapsody in Mauve and Purple Afternoon, KST SCENT's Tambae, Marissa Zappas' Carnival of Souls (there is something in it that smells EXACTLY like a concession or candy and what it is always escapes me).
I like to do dorky things like wear With the Candlestick to see Conclave (this scent is also very tied to playing Pentiment for me). I wear SYD's Angelface to bed a lot, or with outfits that are winkingly girlish. I wore Pearfat's Bread + Roses on Easter last year. The only time I've used an AI chatbot is to ask Claude to write me a perfume profile and some "perfume prompts."
When I lived in New York, there were a few pizza places where I loved to dine in. I found that I rarely ordered pizza because living in one of the world's great pizza cities, it was actually much harder to figure out what the Good Delivery Place in a given neighborhood was. Sometimes I would just get Domino's because mediocre chain pizza is a known quantity! Where I'm going with this is that perfume as a deep interest has enriched my life, but it's made the idea of a "signature scent" much trickier. At the moment I set mine on Frangrantica to Sublimate because I've been wearing it so much and I find it quite unique, but I don't feel that sense of ownership and identification I did about Castelbajac over 20 years ago. Experimenting with so many lovely things and having a perfume to go with almost any mood, weather, or outfit is a nice problem to have, but I still admire the concept of a signature scent. It's chic, as knowing yourself and committing to it so often is.