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In Flowers by Neia Scraps
Template from Travel Basics West by Miss Fish
Journaling:
What is your favourite perfume? It should be a relatively easy question to answer but the more I think about it, the more I reflect back on my perfume “maturity” evolving over time. My first memories of “perfume” go back to childhood when Christmas and birthdays would almost always include a novelty bottle of THE perfume for young girls – Sweet Honesty by Avon. I had lots of different bottles over the years but I loved the deer for some reason.

I remember feeling incredibly sophisticated and grown up when I got a bottle of Lily of the Valley (also from Avon) as I got a bit older and that scent is still one that I love, maybe because of the scent itself or maybe because there is such a connection between scents and memory.

My nana was the perfume person in my life all through my childhood. She had so many different bottles and scents (probably not that many, but as a child it seemed like a lot) and they had interesting glass stoppers for daubing scent on your wrists and throat without wasting any. Nana was the one who gave me a set of mini French perfumes as a gift one year and I kept them for ages, opening them one at a time, smelling them, trying them on searching for the “best” one.

When I was a teenager, we took a trip to Hawaii courtesy of my grandpa the year after he remarried following Nana’s death. Hawaii was fun and the smell of sun and sand was captured for me in a scent called “Wicked Wahine”. I was in Grade 12 at the time and I remember bringing a bottle back with me so I could smell like Hawaii even though the trip was long over.

Once I started working, I received a bottle of Ysatis by Givenchy, and it became a favourite instantly and probably for the longest time in my life of sticking to one scent. 20 or so years later I was introduced to Shi by Alfred Sung and liked equally well so kept both in my dresser and used them frequently. That all stopped when scent sensitivity and scent-free workplaces and scent-free public spaces became a big deal. In the 90s and 2000’s we stopped being able to wear perfume at the office and it wasn’t even allowed at church.

When we moved to the South Pacific, I fell in love with the much lighter scents of tropical florals from Pure Fiji. Living very close to the Pure Fiji plant, spa and Outlet store probably helped a lot too.

Back in Canada, the combination of fragrance-free medical facilities, and a newly acquired sensitivity of my own to heavy perfume, I haven’t really made use of perfume in quite a while. For about a year following a bout of COVID, everything smelled like a weird chemical no matter what it was and only in the last few months do I have a renewed sense of smell so maybe I can venture into the world of perfume again.