welcome ♡
warming up
It seems to me every Substack needs a little intro post to set the scene, so here we are. This is in fact my second Substack (I also write autotelica), and the sheer ambition of diving into writing two at once is not lost on me. But I’ve once again fallen into an obsession with perfume — an obsession that has trailed me my whole life — and an indulgence as good as this one deserves its own container.
In a way, it’s a little bit pointless to write about perfume. No matter how well you write, no one can smell what you smell just by consuming your words.
So why bother?
In recent years, I’ve been through a lot of major, challenging transitions that have brought me much more vividly in touch with slowness, decadence, sensuality, and beauty. I imagine there’s a lot I’ll be saying about this in my writing here.
At the same time, the world around me appears to be speeding up. AI is intermediating everything (including a huge percentage of the tech work I’ve been doing). I’ve watched our culture collapse into a globalized, homogenous, high-speed, snack-size, conformist, terrified, shallow, cheap, impatient sameness. Everyone is glued to their phones. Afraid to stand out. Overwhelmed, on a treadmill of wide-eyed competition, unable or unwilling to slow down, subsumed by a sea of slop, pretending everything is fine while harbouring a deep sense of nihilism.
It’s given this context that I feel more urgency than ever to sit down and write about perfume, of all things.
Perfume doesn’t matter at all.
Little glass bottles full of overpriced opaque ingredients, obfuscatory marketing, impossible to convey online, barely perceptible to people I meet IRL and not at all perceptible to anyone I work with remotely, impossible for AI to understand. But these are the reasons I love it. For its brief, elusive, uncommunicable, delicious mystery.
I recently took my sixteen year old niece to Paris for a couple weeks.
The relationship most young women (or grown women, for that matter) have with perfume in our culture is superficial at best. They’re used to getting samples from Sephora, maybe trying a fragrance or two, being asked if they prefer “florals or citrus or woody scents?” by a sales girl, dropping $75 on something 35 million other women are wearing, and calling it a day.
I was really determined to show my niece the way to buy proper perfume, for real.
We spent days flitting in and out of every perfumer we could possibly manage to visit, smelling and spraying and sampling and occasionally trying on scent after scent after scent. To go through the process of perfume selection with her was such a treat. We went deeper down the rabbit hole every day — Fragonard, Killian, Frederic Malle, Serge Lutens, Officine Universelle Buly, Etat Libre d’Orange, Diptyqe, L’Artisan Parfumeur, on and on and on — and I was very proud that she ended up picking up a bottle of Bohoboco’s Wet Cherry Liquor from Nose.
It’s not as easy to shop for the good stuff, and to find things that you love (important!), and that suit you too. This indulgent process of completely personal self-discovery and self-creation demands slowness, patience, time and careful thought.
In Paris, all day long we’d repeatedly check in on each other’s wrists (and sometimes elbows, on particularly productive days) to evaluate how our selections were drying down.
It was wonderful.
For me, it wasn’t just about the act of buying perfume, either. Our deep dive perfume exploration felt like a moment suspended in time — we were also eating great food, and looking at incredible art, and contemplating mortality in little churches and grand cathedrals.
Altogether, these things combined to create an elevated sense of poetry and presence that stood in sharp contrast to the way I’ve been spending most of the last several years of my life: glued to a computer, pouring my life force into growing tech businesses at a gravity-defying pace. Math, rationalism, spreadsheets, code, inputs and outputs and systems, financial performance. In that world, no matter what you achieve, it’s never enough, never enough.
So fuck it.
I’m making space in my life to really indulge in perfume the way I’ve always wanted to.
When I was five years old, I had to have a small operation, and my aunt gave me a My Little Pony to cheer me up. It came in a box with a matching rose-scented perfume. It was girly and grown up all at once. I was delighted, and one of my first perfume memories became anchored in my mind. To this day, I love almost every variation of rose note that I encounter.
Growing up, the women in my life (my mom, my grandma, my friends’ moms) always seemed to put on really nice perfumes to go out for dinner or to leave on a trip somewhere. I collected reams of fashion magazines and smelled all the samples, dreaming about one day being woman who could drive my own car and wear whatever perfume I wanted.
As a teen and a young adult, I became obsessed with finding perfumes other people didn’t know about. I really didn’t want to smell like everyone else, and I put in a lot of effort to achieve this goal. This was the beginning of my enduring fascination with the craft of perfume, and the elusive delight of finding something special and maybe even rare.
I’m no perfumer, no chemist, no expert at all, really. But I adore the transportive romance of a good fragrance. I love being surprised, or knocked sideways, or left reeling with emotion thanks to a scent. Even if a fragrance doesn’t resonate with me, I get a kick out of imagining the type of person who would wear it. Who are they? What’s their life like?
What a treat to put down our self improvement and our work projects and our to do lists and our obligations, and just let an ephemeral, unshareable scent carry us somewhere else, while we hurtle through space on a big old rock, all of us doomed to die one day.
None of it matters, and that’s exactly the point.
yessssss welcome