Scented Diaries 2: Full Fathom Five

Tracking a week in a perfume fanatic's life

Hello all - another busy week and another scented diaries! This week we’re exploring perfume’s final frontier: oceanic perfumes, as well as sample orders, thrifting adventures, scented co-worker stories, and more.

Monday

I stayed up too late the night before editing a post for the newsletter, so I'm grumpy and scowling at every minor inconvenience but I like being in person for meetings so I head into the office for the day. An iced latte and a nice perfume better fix me or my mood will probably get worse.

Today I'm wearing one of the odder bottles in my collection called Merveilleux, from the Australian brand Wik&Co. I discovered this brand through some aggressive social media ad campaigning five or six years ago and bought the sample set. Typically for a niche house the scents have been created by perfumers from the big oil houses and are worth a sniff, though I have to admit I probably wouldn't have bought a bottle if the brand hadn't sent me a 50% off voucher a couple of months after I bought the samples.

I got my bottle of Merveilleux for $74.98 in 2020 and it's retailing for $275 today, which makes me feel both depressed and like my early-pandemic self was really able to nab a deal.

The brand, somewhat painfully, calls itself 'globally relevant' on the website and yet the scents haven't made it into any of the large perfume databases. But Merveilleux is a genuinely lovely thing, competently made and with enough money in the formula to fill its brief without feeling two dimensional or synthetic. This is a rose, iris, and sandalwood perfume squarely in the vintage lipstick world of scent, but without a deep animalic note to make it feel fleshy and dark like Putain des Palaces. It's marketed as a rose perfume but it is really the iris that dominates, powdery and slightly rooty but always in that dainty, well-coiffed way an iris has.

Spraying it always makes me thinking of Sandy in Grease before she starts wearing all the leather, which is to say a girl in Robert Moses' America with a vanity stuffed full of pastel toned powders and cosmetics. If Merveilleux had a colour it would be Pepto-Bismol pink. This feeling of youthfulness in a genre that has been consigned to the 'old lady' realm of perfume makes me feel nostalgic for a world and a childhood I didn't have, and in that way it is the timeless scent of a woman casting a rose-tinted eye back to her youth.

I find Merveilleux pretty and immersive, but it's a strong smell so I only spray once or twice under my clothes. There is something lovely about spraying a perfume not to project out into the world but to keep as a kind of covenant between you and your skin, so that when you tuck your nose into your shoulder you can catch a moment of its drydown and make your day a little brighter.

Sometimes I like for perfume to be just this, a secret I keep all to myself.

This year I’ve been trying to find balance between my job, my second job (substack), the volunteering work I do, spending time with friends and family, and doing things just for fun. It's the last category I struggle with because I often feel wrung out at the end of the day, but today we're going to summon up some courage and go for a swim.

Summer is reaching that golden stage of dying when the nights are just starting to nip and the sunsets turn the world golden bronze. I’m lucky to live in a city that has the largest ocean baths in Australia and I'm quite excited to pack my things and catch the bus over when I clock off.

The ocean, like hot espresso and fresh honeysuckle, is one of the great scents in life that I don't think has ever been properly captured in a perfume. Though I'd love to see it done, if only to puzzle out the technicalities, it occurs to me as I descend to the baths that there's something magical about this particular smell being attached to a time, a place, a feeling. It's an onslaught of the senses, the ocean - the sound of the waves; the grit of the sand; the sting of sunscreen in your eyes and the salt on your tongue and that briny, balmy, beachy, barnacle-y smell.

Though the salicylate and coconut scent of sunscreen may be modern additions, the scent of the ocean is a smell the humanity has been smelling for hundreds of thousands of years - it might be the first smell we ever smelled when we dragged ourselves out of the water. Maybe that’s why we like the ocean so much - there’s always a feeling when you go to the beach that you are returning to some simpler, more primal form.

I'm sure I look a sight in my googles and rashie and aqua shoes (I love the ocean but I do not trust her), but I can’t bring myself to care. I swim around until the sun sinks behind the headland and then drag myself reluctantly home to have dinner and plot when I can next go back to the baths.

Marveilleux is still clinging to the clothes I thrown on over my swimmers, and its musky sandalwood drydown mixes with the salt water drying on my skin.

Tuesday

It’s trivia night which means I should spray something that I know will last the 12+ hours that I'm going to be out and about. But sometimes the nose wants what the nose wants, and for some reason as I'm eating my crumpets and pondering my grab tray I end up reaching for L'Homme Ideal.

Any perfume fanatic with a serious love for the art form will tell you that LVMH buying Guerlain was the worst thing to ever happen to brand (it was), that the house is a pale ghost of what it once was (it is), and that the endless flankers they roll out have killed the soul of the only French brand that could stand shoulder to shoulder with Chanel as one of the great scions of 20th century perfumery (they have).

These are all truths and the L’Homme and Mon Guerlain perfume lines are the embodiment of them - and yet I own a bottle of L'Homme Ideal, and would happily own a bottle of Mon Guerlain as well. Mitsouko and L'Heure Bleue they are not but there is something mindlessly pleasant about them, something so focus-group approved and simplistic that in wearing them I fill as if my brain, too, is given the space to let a bit of air in and to not think so much.

L'Homme Ideal is a surprisingly powdery almond-and-cedar thing that has not a single clever thing to say and sometimes that's exactly what the doctor ordered. I spray it about ten times, knowing it's not going to last until lunch, and head off for the bus.

Our office spans three floors with a large, ochre-coloured staircase connecting them. I'm halfway down in search of some milk for my afternoon coffee when someone shouts my name.

I have a child's Pavlovian response to being given ad hoc chores when I hear my name being called and freeze immediately before turning, Wil-E-Coyote style, to face the caller.

'Miccaeli,' she says from the floor below me, 'I need your help.'

Oh god, oh god. It's going to be terrible. The rest of the afternoon is going to be chewed up fixing some random snafu -

'Don't worry - it's about perfume.'

Dawn on the Moskva River - I'm thrilled. I practically skip down the rest of the staircase and book some time that afternoon to talk.

My coworker has an interesting and delicious conundrum. Since I've known her she has always worn Ariana Grande's Moonlight, and it smells wonderful on her - I've been a fan of punchy plum notes in perfume ever since I smelled Marc Jacobs' Decadence, and Moonlight has a similarly gorgeous plummy opening.

But her husband has recently gotten a new cologne - Givenchy Gentleman - and this cannot do. She says it plainly: she's got to get a new perfume that smells better than his. Though I was always going to agree, this is an especially fun assignment. I tell her not to worry and that I'll get to work on it.

'Budget?' I ask.

'Doesn't matter,' she says, then screws up her nose. 'Nothing too powdery, though.'

'So something like Carolina Herrera Good Girl - no?'

'Ugh, god no!'

Ah, Good Girl. It's like a perfume litmus test - every woman has smelled it and every woman has feelings about it - a true scent of extremes. Black Opium also works in a pinch.

I leave excited for the side hustle. I put together sniffing guide slideshows for my co-workers every so often, but the last one I made was before Christmas so it’ll be nice to stretch the muscle again.

The Guerlain has faded, so I grab a sample from the set I keep on my desk to spray before trivia. It's good old Chergui, the Serge Lutens tonka-hay masterpiece that I know will layer well with the lingering remains of L'homme Ideal.

I couldn’t make trivia last week because I had an offsite planning day with work and I hear about it and then some when I arrive at the bowling club. A few of my trivia friends read the newsletter and ask me, gently, about the Gris Clair article. I tell them that I'm alright, that it all happened a while ago now and I'm happy to have written it. They ask about another scent I mentioned in the article, Rose Flash, and we lament how difficult it is to get Andy Tauer perfumes in Australia these days - I promise to bring it next week so we can have a sniff.

We come equal second in trivia. As we’re packing up I think about how I love the smell of the bowlo - the lingering ash of cigarettes on people's clothes and the hoppy warmth of beer that seems baked into the walls and the carpet, a hundred faint sillages like little worlds clashing and combining together to create something dense and new. It's a familiar smell, a happy smell, unpretentious and open-armed - the smell of somewhere you are happy. The smell, I conclude, of a third place.

Wednesday

The first really expensive perfume I bought for myself as a young person was Pomegranate Noir by Jo Malone. There's a story behind that like there is for every bottle in my collection, but safe to say I wore it relentlessly and now keep a tiny amount in the bottle so I can lift the lid, sniff, and remember.

The only other Jo Malone I own is Blackberry and Bay, which is the scent of this Wednesday.

Since I saw the new Bridget Jones movie on Valentine's Day I've been thinking non stop about a scene where they show Bridget's cluttered bathroom, including a shot of a 30ml Jo Malone bottle with the label hidden by a silk scrunchie tossed artlessly over the lid.

This faux-casual mis-en-scene is so emblematic of the generation of women who grew up with Bridget Jones - and, indeed, Jo Malone perfumes - that I know it is why I’m drawn to spray my own 30ml Blackberry and Bay cologne for the day even though I know it's going fade as soon as I reach the office. I chuck it in my bag, feeling very frazzled English woman, to respray after I go to the ocean baths again this afternoon.

There's probably an article hiding in the the cultural imprint of Jo Malone perfumes, I think as I go about my work day. I could name five films off the top of my head that feature bottles as a signifier for character; perfumes from the line are famously namechecked by royals as their favourite scents.

And there is something so performatively British about them, even the lovely sharp-cheeked bite of Blackberry and Bay; it's the smell of the Portobello Road scene in Notting Hill, the dream of a London that thousands of 20-something Australians fly off in search of, cost of living and conversion rates be damned.

And if there's a Brexit-ish sort of irony in the fact that Jo Malone (the woman) sold that brand and now has a new line, Jo Loves, that she works on out of her new home in Dubai, maybe that's quintessentially English too.

Even though I have to keep ducking into a small room and re-upping the sharp green of Blackberry and Bay like an addict, it is verdant and fresh-faced company as I count down the hours until I get can get to the ocean baths again.

Today it's overcast and the ocean is cast in periwinkle blue rather than its usual glass-green. The edge of the baths brushes up against the rocky cliff face of the ocean, and today the wind stirs up the waves so that they mostly break on the rocks but some still flow over into the pool.

The seafoam gets caught in my hair and I try to grab it between my hands to smell - there's the briny scent of the ocean, of course, but also something a little grassy that reminds me of... well, of a matcha latte.

I hang around by the pool edge to try and grab some more foam and explore this further. As the sun sets and the water is cast in a twilight glow the seafoam takes on a kaleidoscopic pearlescence, the kind of shimmery colour that makes me understand why the Greeks thought Aphrodite emerged from it.

The mind jumps to connections sometimes before the person can keep up, and it takes me a moment to wonder why I am in the baths treading water and thinking of The Tempest. It's one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, and one that can be interpreted a hundred different ways - power dyanmics and colonialism and the purpose of playmaking itself are all wrapped up in its story of shipwrecks and spells.

But the opening storm and the island setting are some of Shakespeare's most evocative. It's a line of Ariel's, with a delightful mix of beauty and body horror, that I realise I've been reminded of as I clutch at the seafoam and watch the troubled water:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

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Thursday

I wake up and immediately know that what I suspected yesterday was the beginnings of a sunburn is in full flush this morning. I'm kicking myself - if there's one thing I am evangelical about besides perfume, it is sunscreen, but I must have spent too long in the pools yesterday and didn't reapply. I now have to do the walk of shame into the office with the red cheeks and nose of a theatre clown as I welcome back freckles that I haven't seen since I was a teenager.

I'm so distressed by this turn of events that I reach for something cool-toned to soothe me, which turns out to be Grey Vetiver from Tom Ford. I suppose my brain, rebelling at all the water based shenanigans of the week, wanted something firmly rooted to the earth. I am of the strong belief that the best Tom Ford scents are all in the Signature line and that the Private line is mostly a waste of space, and my collection echoes this as the scents I own from the brand are all Signatures with their gaudy retro ribbed bottles.

There is no way to describe Grey Vetiver other than to say it is a vetiver for dandies - it is the vetiver that Oscar Wilde would wear if he was alive and had disposable income. Vetiver is too strong and too earthy a note to be ever be forced into a fougere structure but this perfume damn well tries, and I have always found it to be a more modern and self-serious take on Guerlain's Vetiver (which has too much grapefruit in it for me - it smells, unfortunately, like a man who wears boat shoes).

Grey Vetiver is the kind of perfume that would go perfectly with a drizzly London day and a pinstriped suit but all I can give it is an AC/DC shirt, a tartan skirt, and a muggy Australian summer's afternoon.

We're going out for after work drinks to a tiki-themed hole in the wall I've chosen because I liked the look of the pictures on Google Maps. I'm praying it's a win and not a dive so I don't have to resort to desperate manoeuvres (the local pub) to salvage the night. I don't often enjoy coconut in perfumes but I like it perfectly well in cocktails and order a coco espresso martini that tastes, dangerously, as if it has no alcohol at all.

The bar's décor leans closer to pirate cove than tiki bar - the ocean calls so strongly this week! - and I compliment it by saying it feels like it would be a bar at a theme park. There are no windows and the doors are covered in bamboo panels, so it feels like a small and secluded place where time slows to a crawl and my friends and I can talk of everything and nothing. It's a wonderful night.

At some point my friend brings up an induction session she and I were doing with a new starter earlier today. He had been wearing a forcefully strong cologne that had been nagging at me for the entire session. If it was a woman I would have asked up front, but men can get cagey and most of the time I keep quiet (even though it eats at me). By the end of the session, though, I felt like we'd built enough of a rapport that I delved in:

‘Your cologne - is it Montblanc?’

‘Oh,' he blinked. 'I dunno - I didn’t look at the label.’

I wait, patiently, as he sniffs his collar and thinks back to his morning.

‘I got it ages ago - it kind of looks like a trophy?’

‘Ah,’ I nod. ‘Invictus. Paco Rabanne.’

‘How the hell…? That’s insane.’

My friend is sitting next to us and laughing.

‘No,’ she says, ‘that’s just Miccaeli.’

Friday

I set my alarm for 5am with the ambitious goal of going for a swim before work starts, flying in the face of a lifetime's worth of experience that says I will never, ever be a morning person. My strength, however, is weaker than my ambition as I roll around groaning about coco espresso martinis, and before too long it's time for work.

On Fridays I usually wear my stinkers, challenging perfumes that I wouldn't want to inflict on people in public unawares. But today I decide that the week has lead me in a certain direction and I shall follow the tide: I'm going to wear a perfume I find challenging for myself. I’m going to try and wear an oceanic perfume.

Aquatic scents can only fall into one of two categories: sports and cosmic horror.

Every water-themed perfume I have ever smelled is either a heightened version of deodorant or the smell of ocean bones as they slowly decay over millennia and turn into crude oil - there is no in-between. I have no interest in the first and every time I have tried to approach the second in good faith, such as Lush's Lord of Goathorn, I have been possessed by a gut deep, sickening wave of existential dread, a genetic knowledge that the ocean is alive and will harm you.

Even the indie/artisan world has never shown me an aquatic I've enjoyed: I find Squid from Zoologist an inky nightmare, and Tauer's Phataloblue has such a nuclear calone note that I sprayed it once and vowed to never touch it again. But as I'm browsing through my sample collection I remember a little dabber bottle I have stashed away as it was rare, expensive, and bloody hard to get my hands on: Onycha from DSH Perfumes.

Onycha, which means 'fingernail' in Greek, is an ancient ingredient named as part of incense mixtures in the Torah. What exactly onycha was has been lost to us, making it a kind of olfactory mystery - theories range from cistus labandum to a lost kind of incense to the insides of mollusks. Interpreting or recreating ancient scents is a small but passionate genre of perfumery - kyphi, an ancient Egyptian incense compound, is one of the most popular scents to recreate - and one I take a keen interest in.

For Onycha, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz riffs on the theory that the ancient material was the scrapings of mollusks found in Red Sea. The result is an ambered-incense fragrance with a briny, oceanic element scraping the edges and giving it contrast and depth - Jonah inside the whale, as it were.

If L'Homme Ideal was our no-brainer perfume of the week, Onycha is the exact opposite: it demands your attention almost like a scholarly thesis engaging with you and presenting its argument for discussion. Amber perfumes almost always convey warmth and that is present here from some truly beautiful work with resins, but somehow at the same time Onycha conveys a sense of coldness, as if it all its ingredients were harvested just as the sun dipped below the horizon.

The oceanic accord here is masterfully done; Spencer-Hurwitz knows that even a drop too much and ocean and the entire thing will be spoiled and become unsmellable. Instead it hums along in the background, the smell of the ocean from far away like the sound of a wave in the distance. There's also something nearly uncomfortably fleshy here, like the perfume wants to convey the sense of the onycha-mollusks as the living things they once were - or perhaps it's the smell of ancient people who made the incense that you can see through the waves and the smoke.

I put a tiny dot of Onycha on my wrist and on a blotter, and I'm almost tempted to skip the baths so I don't have to wash it off. But the ocean calls and I, helplessly, answer - and in thinking of Onycha and of the water I'm struck by why the perfume works. Instead of taking its oceanic theme as one of leisure (sports) or of fear (cosmic horror), Onycha treats the ocean with reverence, a spirituality, a cultural significance that we give to few notes other than incense.

Maybe that is the key to oceanic perfumes - you have to acknowledge that the ocean is greater than you, a place so powerful and so present in the human mind that it is transformative by nature. You have to know that the ocean should be treated like something so foreign to us that it is therefore close to God.

When I get home to the simmering drydown of Onycha it's joined by a happy surprise - the perfume sample order I've been waiting for has arrived early. I know that if I open the box I will end up spraying the whole lot in a hedonistic frenzy, so I am very responsible and put it in my office for the weekend.

Instead I make dolma for dinner, settle in to watch Master and Commander, and think about higher powers and the endless blue.

Saturday

I'm up early for the weekend as my family is coming over for a day of thrifting and then a movie, which is surely why Saturdays were invented.

My family all like perfume but they like it the normal, socially acceptable amount. I know that when I go to buy perfume as a gift for them I’ll most likely be able to find something they’ll love at the local department store counters.

What they don’t like is ‘the weird shit’, a term which includes pretty much every left-of-the-designer-aisle scent I have ever subjected them to. The definition covers everything from ouds (‘antiseptic’) to animalics (‘dirty nappy’) to lavender (‘head lice serum’) to a particular pineapple-patchouli scent that once caused an allergic reaction, spoiled family board game night, and lead to accusations of chemical warfare.

They’re long suffering, my family, and every time I see them I’m faced with a choice to play nice and wear something tame or pull out a stinker and cause chaos and bloodshed.

I decide to be a merciful god and wear Glossier You layered with Ariana Grande's R.E.M, knowing that the double pear and musk extravaganza is as inoffensive as it's possible for me to be. I have previously described You as a 'perfume for running errands', which rings ever more true each time I spray it, and today I'm reminded that the brand have yet another new scent coming out soon called Fleur. I make a note in my calendar to put it on the to-sniff list.

When we're out thrifting we stumble on a gold mine: an entire table of vintage Avon perfume bottles. I can't tell if these beauties are all from one estate or have been collected by the store over the years, but I'm in heaven opening them up and smelling them, even though they mostly just smell of alcohol and aldehydes.

There are bottles shaped like flowers and angels and girls in ballgowns, a flacon that looks eerily like Pasha de Cartier, and a pair of empty green splash vials shaped like beautiful little minarets. I'm struck with sadness for a moment that so much of the fun has been taken out of perfume. Though I know it's much more cost effective to have every scent in an identical plain glass bottle, sometimes I think I'd push a rock up a mountain every day to buy a silly little perfume shaped like a swan.

We're going to see the new Marvel movie, which makes me laugh once again at the power of the subconscious: it's called Brave New World, which is another line from The Tempest. I guess I have Prospero on the brain this week.

The film is... fine. I tend to enjoy the ritual of going to the movies even when what I see isn't the best thing in the world. A dark room, a big face, and the salty-buttery-sweet smell of post mix soda and popcorn are hard to beat.

After the movie we talk about plans and presents for Easter as we browse through a bookstore and I pluck out trade paperbacks I think my mother and sister will like. My mother reminds me that she would love a full size bottle of Aerin's Mediterranean Honeysuckle, which I bought for her in a rollerball for Christmas. I'm happy to agree, because there's no gift in the world that is better than perfume.

Sunday

When I was out and about yesterday my internet modem decided to go ahead and die at home, which is bad news indeed considering it's publish day. I called the provider and they put me on a wait list and said they'd call me back the next day, so my usual homebody Sunday is up in flames if I want to meet deadline.

Grumbling about technology even though I know that I've gotten a good year and a half out of the router without any trouble, I pack up and head to my favourite bookstore-cafe for a cappuccino and free wi-fi.

What I want is to follow up this working session with a swim but I decide to be responsible and go home to wait for the internet call. I console myself by opening my box of samples and having a first sniff. I ordered this box for a sample I'm wanting to test for a House Overview article, but the shop has a $100 threshold for free delivery and I did what any perfume obsessive would do to meet it.

The order includes a new FZOTIC, Lilac Brulee, which I've been buzzing to try for months because I love when artisan houses set their hand to gourmands. I own two FZOTIC perfumes, Montserrat and Lampblack, and have found every scent from the house to be worth smelling. Lilac Brulee is no exception, but as soon as I spray it I know it's going to need further observation.

Also in the package are a few new and new-to-me Zoologists including Beaver Maple, King Cobra, and a second sample of Penguin as I used up my first one. I also ordered a few more BORNTOSTANDOUT scents. I've been less than impressed by the house so far, but it's hard to walk past a perfume simply called NUTS.

Still no call about the router, so I definitely could have gone to the baths, but I console myself by planning to go again tomorrow.

I spray Penguin as my scent of the day because I have missed its strange iciness. This is a perfume that uses ozonic notes to mimic an eye-watering freshness that I assume other perfumers steer away from because it does remind one, not unpleasantly, of Listerine. There's a medicinal bite to Penguin similar to the icy heat of menthol candy that I appreciate as a self professed Vicks VapoRub aficionado.

Penguin has always reminded me of a very, very fancy version of the kind of men's shower product that is slime green in colour and is called WINTER BLAST or ICE POWER, with a lightning bolt or a wolf on the bottle. It is very silly and very clever, and on a muggy afternoon it’s good company.

As I use my phone to hotspot to the laptop to finish off my diaries, I think about what a water drenched week it has been. I wonder if I started a chain of events by going to the baths on Monday or if it was simply confirmation bias to see water, water everywhere as the waves took up more and more space in my mind.

Or perhaps as summer fades the week has been what Shakespeare calls a sea-change, a transformation through the water into something rich and new. I know that feeling. And I know a few perfumes that smell like that, too.

M