When Meredith and David met in graduate school, they both liked scent but weren’t fiends for it: Meredith wore mostly Chanel Coco, and David stuck to essential oils. It wasn’t until they moved in together that they really began exploring perfume. Over the fifteen years or so since, Meredith and David have built a modest but thoughtful collection of shared and separate fragrances.

First, a little background. Meredith, an artist, grew up in Anaconda, Montana, in a rambling Victorian house. Her family wasn’t big on perfume, although she remembers her mother occasionally wearing something that smelled like lilies of the valley. When Meredith was a teenager, she bought a bottle of Coco, which became the foundation of the few bottles of perfume she kept on hand and set the stage for her love of orientals. As she was finding her perfume legs, she wore Jessica McClintock and Issey Miyake Eau d’Issey, too.

David, also an artist and management at a big Portland design firm, grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, in a fragrance-loving Italian-American family…

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Like many Now Smell This readers, Tara grew up fascinated with perfume. It started with a bottle of Jean Naté splash in the bathroom, grew to appreciate her mother’s Nina Ricci L’Air du Temps and Jean Desprez Bal à Versailles, and proceeded in her early twenties to embrace classic whoppers including Giorgio, Christian Dior Poison, and Givenchy Ysatis before mellowing out. Unlike most of us, however, her collection now soars somewhere north of 700 bottles.¹

Tara says that her perfume collection was a standard rotation of five or six bottles until 2005 when she discovered the Perfume of Life forum. That was the same year her husband started traveling to Europe for work. Tara began handing him shopping lists…

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After learning how Brooke approaches perfume, I’m not sure why she doesn’t run NASA. She is analytical and organized (excel spreadsheets track perfume notes); passionate (764 bottles and counting); and inquisitive (witness her tray method, explained later). She’s also generous and open, and she was game to be the subject of this month’s perfume cabinet article…

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“I have no perfume memories,” says Arielle Weinberg, blog mistress of The Scents of Self and owner of the brand new niche perfume shop, Arielle Shoshana, in suburban Washington, D.C. Ari’s father lost his sense of smell in a car accident before she was born, and her mother didn’t wear fragrance.

So, what got her interested in perfume? Mascara. When Ari was 15 years old (she’s 24 now), she was looking up mascara reviews and stumbled upon Makeup Alley, which led her to the Penny Pencil’s poetic reviews. Besides mascara, Penny Pencil reviewed perfume. Ari was at first intrigued, then hooked. In D.C., where Ari lived, she didn’t have much access to niche fragrances, so she dived into the Guerlains and Bond No. 9s. For a few solid years, she wore Bond No. 9 New Haarlem, and she still loves Guerlain L’Heure Bleue…

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