The Places Scent Takes Us
By Megan Volpert
We could just say my father had a strong aversion to perfume, so the origin of my interest in it becomes obvious. Or we could skip over Freud to point a hippy dippy finger at the Zodiac, my Libra air sign. Determining an inception point for this passion is less important than sniffing out how it has become fundamentally a part of my character. Perfume has armed and disarmed me.
If we are what we eat, we might do well to remember that what we taste is actually around seventy percent smell. After I’m finished writing today, there’s overnight oats made with blueberries and lemon curd awaiting me in the fridge, and it will be set off nicely by Lavender Extreme. The vanilla base note will soften up the tartness of the lemon curd and whatever is left of the lavender heart note will strengthen the juicy indigo impression of the blueberries. You can radically alter a dining experience by fragrance, and this is part of why smoke is such an essential ingredient. By accident of the necessity of heating our food in order to cook it, smoke is probably the first human-made fragrance.
A scent is so tenuous, hanging there for just a moment in the ether. This is what makes the spell of smell so tenacious. Perfume always only evokes. It is ever behaving as a tether to other things, a tool of connectivity. Colors, attitude, memory. It’s incredible that we can bottle that.
Scent is an archive for memory, yet scent itself cannot really be archived except with great difficulty. If one wants to smell something the way it smelled two hundred years ago, one should go to the many small, local perfumers all over the world who for decades and occasionally centuries have avoided mainstream branding and marketing. These are families that have handed their formulas down generations of bloodline.
Their secret recipes can usually be enjoyed cheaply, like those at Bourbon French Parfums. The good people at Bourbon French have been in the French Quarter of New Orleans since August Doussan set up shop there in 1843 and any generous 10ml sample bottle is a mere $9. This means you can try literally everything they have ever made for a grand total of less than $900. I believe over the years I pretty well have. The samples I liked most, I got in 120ml bottles for under $40 each.
This includes the legendary Eau de Cologne worn by Napoleon, the incense musk of Eau de Noir and Olive Blossom. The Bourbon French interpretation of Olive Blossom is how I ended up going to them in the first place. I acquired a scent memory that I became desperate to find in a bottle.
“I wanted to be able to capture that Scent, to be able to control the frequency with which I could feel all the things I felt inside that scent.”
While attending graduate school in Baton Rouge, behind the library at Louisiana State University, there was an alcove that was always wonderfully redolent with the sweet olive growing nearby, and I wanted to be able to capture that, to be able to control the frequency with which I could feel all the things I felt inside that scent. It came to stand in for that extremely formative three years of my life.
As I combed the internet for renderings of sweet olive, I realized the raw materials could only be sourced from Louisiana for authenticity’s sake. There are only so many perfumers in the state, and when I contacted Mary Eleftorea Behlar, I knew she was the one.
Mary, the owner of the shop since 1991, walked me through their options—Sweet Olive versus Olive Blossom versus Evermore—and ultimately sent me all three so I could decide which one most closely resembled my memory in a bottle. Evermore included the Stephanotis flower often mistaken for sweet olive. My money was on Sweet Olive itself, but it focused on the sugar and wax of the flower, whereas Olive Blossom captured not only the flower but the green of the whole plant.
That was a good surprise, and I use it like the flux capacitor in Back to the Future. Any time I need to reminisce about the person I used to be—or summon her forth to vanquish new challenges for which she is sometimes better equipped than the person I am now—that Olive Blossom perfume has proved to be very efficacious medicine worth keeping close at hand for emergencies.
Excerpted from Perfume by Megan Volpert, just published as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.
Megan Volpert is a frequent contributor to PopMatters and a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. She has written or edited over a dozen books, including Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (2020), RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy (2019) and Boss Broad (2019).