1: Eau De Whatever
In May 2016, my husband Joe and I went up to New York City over Memorial Day weekend. We stayed at the Ace Hotel, where they gave us our room keys in a little kraft paper envelope advertising Le Labo, the fancy perfume store connected to the hotel. There’s also a Stumptown coffee connected to the hotel, and several bars and restaurants connected to the hotel, and the whole of Manhattan connected to the hotel, and all of this combined—I thought—into a very strong, specific scent. Often, out and about in the city, I would open my bag and a cloud of the hotel smell would whiff up at me, as precise and undiluted as if I’d just walked through the lobby doors. I didn’t mind. It smelled good.
Back home in Atlanta a few days later, unpacking, I smelled the smell again and realized that what I’d been smelling all along was, in fact, our room keys’ kraft paper envelope. It had been spritzed with a sample of Le Labo perfume—more than spritzed, truly, because the scent lingered for days, then weeks. I know this because I threw out all the boarding passes and receipts and museum maps and other detritus that had accumulated in my bag throughout the trip, but I kept that little envelope.
I put it on a shelf in my closet and I smelled it all the time—when I was getting dressed in the morning, or changing into my pajamas at night, or whenever I was feeling bad. And in the weeks after we returned from the trip, I was feeling bad a lot. My grandmother was sick and then she died and then the GOP convention happened and Donald Trump happened and so much felt wrong in so many ways on so many levels. But for as long as just a smidgen of the hotel smell clung to the fibers of that little envelope, I was tethered to a better version of the world. That brief sliver of before.
So when the smell finally faded—or rather, when at long last I realized that I was compulsively sniffing a scentless, increasingly dusty envelope—I was bereft. Very privately bereft. By now things in the world seemed and/or were even worse and I went around most days with my brain looping a chorus of we’re fucked we’re fucked we’re fucked we’re fucked! But also I really needed to smell that smell again.
I turned first to the Le Labo website, thinking maybe they old sold one kind of perfume. They do not. They sell dozens, and each scent is described in a very precise, evocative way with zero instructive details. Before all this I might have assed my own personal sense of smell as “alright” and my tolerance for figurative language as “high-ish” but I am still not sure what could possibly be described as “leaves an intriguing spiritual dimension in its wake” or “combines freshness, sweetness and sensuality with acrobatic talent” or “Genghis Khan meets Shah Jahan for tea with Scheherazade.” None of that sounded like what I was looking for, which was “my personal experience of New York City in late May 2016 and also how I want to smell for the rest of my life.”
Previously in the realm of personal fragrance, I’d been an unrepentant serial monogamist. I had my middle school fling with Juniper Breeze (which I thought smelled just like a Juniper Breeze, which I believed to be some sort of obscure meteorological phenomenon) before working my way through the rest of the Bath & Body Works oeuvre: Cool Citrus Basil, White Tea & Ginger, Pink Grapefruit. The summer I graduated from college, around the time I decided I was due for something a little more grown-up, Joe went to Italy and brought me back a little glass bottle of something warm and gold and spicy, but I was afraid to touch it, let alone wear it. In some ways this describes the whole experience of my twenties! Instead, I tended to favor a limited-edition biodynamic fragrance called Crippling Anxiety Alternating With Crushing Depression. Then my mother got really into Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue and something about smelling like my mother deeply appealed to me so I got into Light Blue, too. And then came the hotel smell.
It was absolutely vexing. I was desperate to know what it was and had no idea how to find out. Once, I came into possession of a few free Le Labo samples; by then, I’d decided that the scent I was after could be described as smelling like “brown,” so I excitedly selected the vial labeled “Tubereuse 40,” which made me think of a potato. I over-optimistically sampled it on my own wrist then wafted around all day smelling like “pink” with overtones of “disappointment.” I became a studious sniffer of Target candles; one with white tea and fig seemed like a winner, at least until I took it home and actually lit the wick, at which point it seemed to emit a negative smell, a miasma of nothingness. I stood in my bathroom sniffing so insistently for so long that I got lightheaded and had to sit down.
It was so stupid and I felt so sad! The only time I ever came close to smelling the smell was whenever I was back in New York. I’d be walking down the street and it would waft out of a random doorway or whoosh out in the wake of a passerby. Or it would seem that way. I told myself it was all in my head. It was just the association of the place with itself, the effect of being so far outside my regular life, the collapsed-time sense of being in the same place where I smelled it for the first time years ago.
I continued my dalliances. I moved on from Light Blue to some powdery flowery stuff I bought at Anthropologie before realizing what I really wanted was to smell like Anthropologie. (That was more easily achieved.) Soon after, I came across a sample of Glossier You and swooned. It smelled like someone’s birthday party in the early 90s; it smelled going to the like the mall with ten dollars in my pocket; it smelled like what I imagined a Baby-Sitter’s Club meeting smelled like. Once Joe and I sat down at the bar at Watchman’s and the bartender looked at me wistfully and said, “Glossier You?” then confessed, so sadly, “Yeah, this girl I was trying to date was obsessed with it.” I offered to change seats but he demurred and just stared into the middle-distance for a long time, drying an already-dry glass.
So that was it, I thought. Outside the occasional psychosomatic echo on the streets of a far-off city, the hotel smell would elude me forever. I would just have to make myself content with any number of other scents, one after another, just as I always had.
And then one morning last November, a headline caught my eye: “New York’s Cult Fragrance Wouldn’t Exist If It Weren’t for Me.” The piece, by Jane Larkworthy, opens like this:
In a recent Quinnipiac poll, one in five women said she wears Le Labo Santal 33 as her preferred fragrance.
Okay, that’s not true—but you did kind of believe me, right? That’s how popular the figgy, leathery sandalwood scent has become since its launch in 2010. It’s the smell of high-end hotel lobbies and celebrities from Meghan Markle to Brad Pitt to Justin Bieber. But the crazy thing is, it almost wasn’t made at all.
Figgy! Hotel lobbies! Justin Bieber? I kept reading and soon realized that I was chuckling demonically. When had it started? Maybe at the reference to the four-year-old New York Times story that lightly bemoaned the scent’s ubiquity six months before it ever hit my nostrils. Or maybe when Larkworthy joined the chorus of lamentation: “Those in the know were quickly being joined by those who wanted to be part of the mystery.” I laughed, and then I frowned, and then I started laughing again. The mystery indeed! All those years, I’d been sniffing in vain for a scent that had long ago become a ho-hum shibboleth among the olfactory elite. My white whale was a basic bitch.
A couple weeks later, I relayed this whole story to a friend who then relayed a story of her own, of meeting a Southern-but-New-York-adjacent colleague at a work event and complimenting her perfume. “Oh, it’s just some palo santo oil,” the other woman said, waving the question away. My friend was taken by the scent and charmed that it was so simple—but when she acquired and sniffed her own palo santo oil, she fully recoiled. “That woman was not wearing palo santo oil,” she declared to me. “She was wearing Santal 33 and didn’t want to admit it!”
I have to say that I did feel a little sheepish. Like I’d been all, “What is this sleek, quiet little automobile? I’ve never seen anything like it!!!!” and the world was like, “It’s a Prius, ya ding-dong.” But also, this stuff clearly hasn’t saturated Atlanta. If it had, I would have known what it was years ago, because I would’ve accosted the first person I could smell it on—a frightening prospect in New York City, and one which I would undertake with minimal compunction down here!
So I just shrugged and mashed that affiliate link. And then I started laughing again when I read Le Labo’s description: “Do you remember the old Marlboro ads? A man and his horse in front of the fire on a great plain under tall, blue evening skies… From this memory is born SANTAL 33: the ambition to create an olfactive form inspired by the great American myth still a source of fantasy for the rest of the world…”
Please just take a minute and try to imagine the personal odor of a cowboy. Like, bean farts to high heaven with subtle notes of genocide? This is fashion???
Anyway, I ordered a sample. It arrived in a kraft paper envelope. I spritzed. I sniffed. It was just what I remembered. After all that, I still couldn’t fathom dropping $200 on less than two ounces of eau de whatever, so I made myself wait until I was done with the last (?? lol nope) draft of my book. The sample lasted two months, just a few days short of when the full size arrived. I’ve worn it every day since. I smell exactly how I want to smell. I smell exactly like so many other people. I don’t mind. We smell good.