Perfume Diary: A Garden Sulk
Everyone thinks of spring as the most fragrant season, at least when it comes to the natural world: all those crocuses sighing open, their stamens vibrating to frequencies we cannot hear, the rain acting as catalyst for scents that have been dormant all winter. The rain activates the chalky coating of the pavement, the salty sapling green of new growth, the noxious hearts of hyacinths and hydrangeas, which smell beautiful and putrid, like birth and death in the same instant. And this is all true: spring is olfactive excess, wild and exuberant and unfurling. But it is also spiky and recalcitrant and indifferent to aromatic comprehension.
Which is to say: I’ve had terrible allergies for the past two weeks, and I haven’t really been able to smell anything. My vision goes in and out of being so blurry that streetlights become yolky blobs, my head feels like cotton batting, and while certain odors make it through the glomeruli and the way to my brain, the constant sinus pressure means that they don’t really linger there and they seem to resonate from a great distance. My whole nasal cavity is a piano with the damper pedal on. This has made it difficult to recommend or really think about perfume, as I’ve been just trying to stuff enough Zyrtec into my body to function. I get so frustrated with this transitional period every year, but at some point I should probably stop fighting it and learn to accept that this is what spring is: it’s brutal, in that it is nature’s most sublime time and also the time when nature most consistently resists human interaction. It tosses up spores, seeds, smokescreens. It shrouds itself in a callow cloak, a carpet of pollinated wildflowers. It doesn’t want to be fully known, fully inhaled. Big Spring Energy, if such a thing exists, is when something is its most brilliant, glorious self at the very moment it is its most inscrutable.
I was thinking about which perfumes have this energy -- a confounding mix of iridescence and vagueness -- and I kept returning to Bruise Violet, from the Dallas perfume house Sixteen92 (the founder, Claire Baxter, is a fragrance renegade who continually pushes boundaries that other houses won’t cross; I get so excited whenever she releases a new collection). Bruise Violet is one of Baxter’s oldest and most popular creations, the winner of an Art and Olfaction Award, a scent that never leaves her website. And I think it’s because it frustrates and delights noses in equal measure, just like springtime. It’s a violet, yes -- the powder puff of purple, the talcum scent of an old compact -- but then comes the bruise, the wallop. An overripe rose, a twist of sour grapefruit, lipstick that was left capless in a drawer for too long. It’s life and decay, regeneration and illness, beauty and suffering, all shoved into the same liquid. I like to use it to anoint the season, even if I can barely smell it through my ragweed haze. I know that to others, whose noses are gracefully beginning to clear, I must smell like April, florid and grey. It makes me think of Amy Gerstler’s poem, “In Perpetual Spring,” that opens with the line “Gardens are also good places/to sulk.” This perfume is sulking outside, huddled into the dirt, protected by hedgerows, alone and surrounded. — RS