Perfume Diary: Back to School with Ariana Grande (HF)

The air is sharp in the morning now; it’s here, it’s time, at last. Fall wipes away summer’s sweat and excess, the cold dousing us with ambition and forward motion, with the urgency of limited time, the delicious warning of the shrinking light at the bottom of the afternoon. It’s time to go back to school. 

Back to school is a lot of people's favorite season, and it doesn’t matter if one is or has ever been actually going back to an actual school. You don’t have to live on the academic calendar, or have any kind of material association with it, to love the snap in the air at the beginning of September. You don’t have to need new pencils in order to want to buy new pencils; we all want new pencils at this time of year. The smells commonly associated with early fall and back-to-school are easy to conjure up, a burning-leaves and libraries mood, elegant and woody and sophisticated. Summer was a child, but fall is a grown-up. We are putting on our sweaters, we are here to learn things. 

However, this assumption misses a crucial aspect of the few days right when the summer turns: One of its great joys is that it is very childish. Early September is a teenager, a teenage moment, and it roots us all back into our teen yearnings. The rituals of this time of year, the things we find ourselves drawn to, the frenzy of buying and re-inventing, notebooks and pencils, are a callback to middle school and high school. Back-to-school shopping, the gleaming, sudden-made aisles in drugstores and Targets and Costcos and Mujis with their pens and binders and notebooks and devices for ordering and organizing one’s life, all of this doesn't really exist beyond our teen years. We grow out of back to school, and the desire to repeat it is about nostalgia, about wanting to be younger than we are. This is the feeling that rushes up when friends post photos of their grade-school-aged kids standing in front of a door in their new clothes and fresh backpacks. It doesn’t apply to most of us, but we fall into its longings like a habit nonetheless, hoping to return to one thing from something else, hoping to exchange lazy hedonism for cold air and hard work, hoping to have reinvented ourselves after the summer, and hoping to see everyone else reinvented. It’s a time of year when we try to feel young enough to think that new pencils are a new world, to believe we'll really use those notebooks we bought. 

All of this is just a way of saying that my back-to-school perfume, the fragrance I have gotten obsessed with as autumn has arrived, is not elegant or sophisticated at all. It does not smell like the library, like the woods, like sweaters, or like tea. It smells like a teenager with a crush. It may actually be the exact opposite of the well-groomed burning-leaves sort of scent that one traditionally associates with fall. I'm embarrassed by it, and I have to pretend that how much I love it is a joke, but listen, the only thing I want to wear right now is Cloud by Ariana Grande.

I could try to claim that my obsession with Cloud is some nostalgia for summer as summer ends. Cloud is an extremely Hot Girl Summer perfume on the surface and in its opening top notes, all sticky coconut and sweet gourmand-y fruits, like a fruit-flavored milkshake, topped generously with whipped cream. But it doesn't really smell like summer to me; it takes itself too seriously for that. It has too much staying power for beachy summer days. It's primarily coconut, but it’s a coconut that really means it. The coconut note is huge and musky, not just a bright fruity splash on top but sunk through all the transitions of the fragrance, tangling up with the vanilla-musk that arrives at the base. If you like that artificial flaked-coconut that's used for baking, if you relish the gooey coconut layer of a shortbread-based bar-cookie, if you want to smell as much like the texture of a coconut dessert as the taste of it, you'll probably love this perfume. 

Cloud is silly, but it's not light; wearing it indoors makes me feel conspicuous and slightly embarrassed, like a teenage girl trying very hard to be sexy in an adult way. I would have loved to have worn this as a teenager. If this had existed when I was fourteen, I probably would have gotten into perfume when I was fourteen, rather than in my late twenties. Ariana Grande herself may be like a twenty-nine-year old's idea of being fourteen, but this perfume is a fourteen year old's idea of being twenty-nine. 

What Cloud is, more than anything else, is a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper, in the shape of a fragrance. The external packaging is all holographic rainbows. I bought the small travel spray, but the larger bottles are shaped like a cartoon fluffy cloud, three-dimensional and bubbly like the background drawing behind the hallucinogenic-neon dolphins and panthers on a Lisa Frank binder. The scent even has a kind of brassily 1980s vibe to it, fruits and musks piled up too big and too much at once, to go with the era that birthed these beloved, too-tacky-to-be-tacky symbols of back-to-school and of childhood. Lisa Frank, it turns out, was a nightmare, and childhood is never as good as you remember; back to school rarely transforms us, and the year goes on like it always does, fresh ambition unravelling into holidays and obligations and the early darkness. But right now the world seems new as plastic wrapping, hopeful as the chemical rush brought on by buying stuff you don’t really need. Cloud smells a little like plastic, but it smells like optimism, too, in all its big forceful major chords. 

I rarely can ever remember anyone using Lisa Frank stuff beyond the end of September. Its aggressively colorful exuberance embodied the overwhelming and unjustified feelings of this time of year, the momentary, cartoonish certainty that we could be anything we wanted to be and that everything was possible in September. Cloud is a bit like that, impressed with itself, blaring neon, playing its music loud. It's marketed as a feminine scent, all vanilla and fruit, but it's actually too fun and proud and brightly-colored to exist in the muted and old-fashioned world of fragrances that hew to a gender binary. This is bisexual lighting as a fragrance; this is when the returning cold air means you can wear your tall boots and leather and loud prints again. This is a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper you can wear and fill up rooms with, reminding everyone else that back to school is ridiculous and teenage and fun, and that this is a time of year when we can dress in costumes, when we can all be ridiculous together. —HF