Perfume Diary: Coffee & Cigarettes (HF)

Sometimes, an obsessive love of fragrance is about creating the opportunity to reunite with an old friend. On Sunday, wandering around on a rare unscheduled afternoon, Thomas and I ended up in Perfumarie, a treasure trove of fragrance adventure in downtown NYC. We hung around and chatted and nerded out about scents, and did their Fragrance Flight, an experience I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone else in New York with an hour or so to spare who wants to discover new and strange favorite scents. It reminded me of the winter when I first got into fragrance, the year of the polar vortex in NYC, when my best friend and I would have adult slumber parties at her apartment on the weekends, burrowing into its radiator warmth, hiding from the outside world, safe from the weather and from our own lives. She would order perfume samples from Surrender to Chance and Olfactif and Luckyscent, and we'd spent hours applying them to our arms until we ran out of skin, marveling at how often they smelled different on each of us, trying to find the weirdest and most heart-stoppingly accurate way of saying how each one smelled, narrating the stories and recollections that the scents brought up out of sleeping memory. Perfumarie’s fragrance flight felt similar - Thomas and I smelled 25 unlabeled clay bowls with a mystery scent inside, each one wafting up associations, memories, and sometimes the stubborn mystery of something familiar. We wrote notes on each one, some as straightforward as "floral" and some as silly and flailingly specific as "soap with a PhD,” or "small town Christmas," or "evil hotel." It reminded me of the way that fragrance is playful, and emotional, deeply personal and deeply silly at once. 

But browsing the store before and after, I was also reminded of those early couple years when I first fell in love with the childlike, slumber-party-confessional, mind-palace-bus-tour joy of fragrance, because I stumbled on an old friend from those days, all dressed up and polished and proud. It was like when you see someone you loved a long time ago and lost touch with, and they're living their best life, so clearly thriving that it makes you proud to have known them once. One of the featured brands in the store was Jazmin Saraï, Dana El Masri's gorgeous line of music-themed scents (she described the inspiration behind the name as combing "the queen of white flowers (Jasmine) and the king of musical genres, Jazz"). 

Years ago, back when I was still just discovering perfume, I had a subscription to Olfactif. One month, sometime right around when the weather turned cooler, their box had included a sample of a perfume named "Otis & Me." The copy said it was meant to smell like Otis Redding's iconic "Coffee & Cigarettes," a song that's been a favorite since I was a teenager, and is partially responsible for the late-night coffee habit I still haven't kicked in my 30s. The fragrance was arresting, both because it opened with a huge explosion of black pepper, leaning into the note in a way few fragrances are bold enough to do, and because, as it settled into skin, it really did smell like the song I love, and like the vision the song conjures up, late late hours at an all-night diner with someone you love, still talking over coffee and cigarettes at 3am, the whole world closed down to the small space between the two of you. I bought Thomas a bottle of it and he wore it a lot that winter, its bold broken-in warmth a fortress against the cold, and then it fell out of rotation, for no good reason at all.

But here it was again, in a display so elegant I barely recognized it. The secret thing I had loved was all grown up; this band whose early stuff I had fallen for was playing a big, shiny venue. Picking up the bottle brought back memories of a past winter, of coziness in snowstorms, a time when Thomas and I had just recently moved in together, when we were newly trying out a partnership on unsteady feet, everything an experiment, a hopeful uncertainty. 

The formulation seems almost unchanged. The brand's website says it's now stronger, which might be possible; I was worried it would be more dilute, so perhaps I was only watching for that, and when it still smelled unabashedly of strong spices and coffee at the opening, I assumed that that meant it was exactly the same. What mattered to me was that what had made me swoon about it was still there and still had the same effect. It smells like a cold night in a warm room, 3am in a diner with rain troubling the windows, warm indoors in a version of the world where you could still smoke in this kind of diner, determined to stay awake in order to have more time with the person across the table, to sink deeper into their mysteries and offer them your own past.

The black pepper unfolds and softens into something welcoming, cardamom and musky skin-warm incense. The least possibly fussy rose whispers a hint around the edges. Tobacco is not a listed note in the fragrance, but it's undeniably present. The scent engineers the worn-in smell of smoke caught in hair, in a leather jacket or a raincoat, between hands reaching across a table littered with a coffee cups. It smells like the place where late night and early morning meet, and like the kind of music that's at once swaggering and easy, into which you could close your eyes and let yourself fall, warm as a dry pair of socks on a rainy night, soft as a bed.

The discovery sample set comes in the shape of a mixtape cassette case and you can bet I will recommend this again when we make our holiday gift guide -- you might want to go ahead and buy it for all your music and fragrance nerd gift needs, anyway.

--HF