Unexpected encounter with a perfume
Nobody wore perfume at home. It wasn't part of my world. My first contact with perfume came at a fairly advanced age.
My first conscious olfactory memory might be the smell of soaps. Of course, Marseilles soap, but curiously more Camay soap, which perfumed the bathroom of this sophisticated godmother of mine.
But my first real encounter with a bottle of perfume was at the high school in Nîmes (France). One day, I accompanied a friend to a perfume shop. She really liked to wear perfume, and I had no culture of perfume at the time. As she regularly used Shalimar by Guerlain (at 14 years old!), we often went to the perfume shop located opposite our high school. For me, perfume was something very exotic and quite incomprehensible. Perfumes and their magical power of attraction and seduction: I remember that I feared my lack of control in the face of possible collateral effects!
A few years later, when I was 16, I was hired for a summer in a hardware store in Coucouron, a beautiful village in the French department Ardèche located not far from the source of the Loire. The store was simply incredible. A real Aladdin's cave. There were screws, fishing bait, pressure cookers and perfumes. Yes, perfumes!
I remember wandering around the store one day and discovering a few perfumes on a shelf. I smelled them all and one of them really appealed to me. I smelled it a few days later and decided to buy it as soon as I got my first paycheck.
It was housed in a very beautiful blue chiseled bottle. Its smell was very comforting, like a cocoon. It said something about me that I liked when I wore it. An interesting new language.
I used it so often that a year later the bottle was empty. But unfortunately I had no way of getting a new bottle, I couldn't remember its name.
Twenty years later, I don't remember the exact circumstances, I had the opportunity to smell Christian Dior's Dune perfume for the first time.
Oddly enough, it brought back vague memories. That smell… I’ve smelled it before… But I couldn’t remember where or who wore it. Those bits of sensations were quite strange to me, who had no knowledge of perfume – with the possible exception of the Shalimar episode – but my memory remained mute.
I smelled Dune several times after this episode until one day I finally visualized myself in the hardware store. I realized that the first perfume I bought was actually a cheap copy of Christian Dior's Dune perfume created by perfumer Jean-Louis Sieuzac. I'm not going to advocate for copies here, but I don't think I would have become a perfume user at that time if it hadn't been for that. I was too shy to go to a perfume store. The plethora of options in these stores terrified me. How can you feel a possible connection between a scent and yourself in such an environment lacking so much intimacy?
Maybe that's why I like the alternative of niche perfumeries where a limited offer of options is presented. You enter, smell at your own pace and let yourself be carried away by the emotions that the perfumes create in you. I would like such a setting, a peaceful atmosphere for the perfumes that I am currently creating.