“My whole life, I’ve hated the smell of flowers in perfume,” Nancy says. Nancy, a vibrant 60-ish artist specializing in fine jewelry, is tall and striking and favors chic black tunics and bold glasses. Comme des Garçons would do well to hire her for an ad campaign.
She grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where her mother wore Chanel No. 5. I ask her if that’s why she doesn’t like floral scents. “Maybe,” she says. Her grandmother smelled of Camay soap and powder…
Earlier this week, as Geri recovered from a hip replacement operation, walker at hand, she told me the story of her journey with perfume. We sat in her dining room. A vase held tight white roses with frilly pink edges that opened to blooms as big as a baby’s head. Behind us was a grand piano and a harpsichord. (Geri is an organist with gigs at churches and funeral parlors throughout town, and she occasionally hosts baroque musical ensembles at her house.)
She told me that the first fragrance she knew well was her mother’s Yardley Lavender. “It was the only perfume my dad liked,” she said. Her father didn’t wear fragrance, although he shaved with a mug of soap, and every once in a while he’d clean the family’s eyeglasses with his shaving brush…
For this Inside the Perfume Cabinet article, we feature NST’s Kevin. Who better to tell his story than Kevin himself?
I became interested in perfume through gardening. My grandmother got me hooked on plants when I was 8 years old; her favorites were all scented: wallflowers, geraniums (for the leaves’ scent), daffodils, sweet peas, Summersweet, magnolias of all types, Nicotiana alata, evening stock, mignonette, roses, lilies, sweet box, Carolina allspice, on and on. I was intoxicated by those aromas and thrilled when I realized many of the scents were available year-round — in soaps and perfumes…
To many of us — especially those in love with vintage fragrance — Jana has the dream job. She owns The Fragrance Vault in gorgeous Lake Tahoe. Besides selling what’s on the market today, she carries rare, discontinued and vintage fragrance, and estimates she has more than 8,000 bottles in stock. Marshmallow, her half-malamute rescue, greets visitors. Anytime she wants, she can sample from decades of Caron Bellodgia or sniff Shiseido Nombre Noir.
Jana says it took her a long time to discover perfume. She grew up poor, splitting her time between her mother’s home in Rhode Island and her father’s place on a Native American reservation. In her teens, she moved in with her Italian grandmother, who was “hard-working, formal and quite glamorous” and who had bottles of Chanel Coco and Diane Von Furstenberg Tatiana, among other fragrances, on her dresser…
Aparatchick — her blog handle — has been a Now Smell This reader since the beginning. “In 2005, I googled ‘perfume blog,’ and the only one I found was NST,” she says. Twelve years and more than a hundred bottles later, she’s still sampling new fragrances and making friends in the community.
Aparatchick is retired from the finance and accounting industry and lives in Florida. However, she grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and it was there she developed her love of rich, deep oriental fragrances — fragrances that don’t wear very well in humid Florida, a subject we’ll tackle in a minute…