Perfume Diary: Several Unsatisfying Greens (HF)

My favorite weather is when it rains in summer, which I know makes me sound like some kind of insufferable 1990s teen wannabe goth, but, ok, listen. Rain is the thing that makes summer green. The right kind of rain makes the trees glow against the weather, and manages to convince me that New York City is a verdant place, somewhere that could reasonably support life.

Heavy rain in summer always feel like something out of childhood, a leftover piece of a world that doesn’t quite exist anymore. I grew up mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, and when I was very young during the years in the 1990s between droughts it absolutely poured rain what felt like all of the time. The rain washed out roads and even sometimes bridges, bringing the verdant, hidden, hilly collection of strung-together towns at the edge of the Bay, nestled up against ferryboats to the city, to a standstill. We had rain days in place of snowdays, when the schools became unreachable due to flooded freeways and everyone stayed home. It is hard for me to remember, now, that this kind of rain is no longer emblematic of that part of the country, that these days are probably no longer a part of anyone’s reality there, and haven’t been for quite some time.

Thomas, who grew up in the rainforest kudzu greens at the northern border of Georgia, talks longingly about “rain you can hear.” Rain down there overwhelms the landscape, and even in December it’s a green rain, refreshing the grass and the leaves and washing everything with a heavy saturation, an almost threatening verdancy. When I say it’s green I mean something neither fresh and nor bright, not renewal or springtime, but rather a green connected to the way the earth is old and to the vast and slightly sinister relief of large bodies of water. I mean being far from home without an umbrella and nothing to do but give up and get soaked, I mean rain that creates its own rules and turns every doorway to a sanctuary.

When I look for a green fragrance at this time of year, what I am looking for is the green of rain you can hear, of washed-out roads and hanging up your clothes to dry after walking home. I am looking for something that smells like the first time Thomas and I drove to Savannah together, when, on the last long straight stretch of highway between an ocean at the edge of the continent and the Cracker Barrel where we’d had lunch, it started pouring. The rain made the highway’s billboards, which were already decrepit and ribboned from other rainstorms, dance like sails, and it turned the green trees greener, whipping them into a cacophony, a tunnel pointed toward the water. I want something that smells like how the air conditioner was on inside the car despite the rain and how I wore a sweatshirt and cut-off shorts and sat with my legs crossed holding a styrofoam takeout mug of coffee and felt that rare sense that the thing I was doing was the same as the idea of it. I want something to smell like learning to drive on washed-out freeways, like a car hydroplaning, like a green California hidden behind hills and beneath leafy canopies, one that doesn’t exist anymore and maybe didn’t even then. I want the scent of when the rain wakes me up in the morning and puts me back to sleep, something that smells like sleeping with the windows open through a summer that never quite arrives.

Perfumes that smell like rain are usually more interested in capturing the scent of wet pavement. The section of the internet that is obsessed with a certain type of moderately obscure word loves the word “petrichor.” Petrichor, which means “the distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a period of warm, dry weather,” comes up often when people talk about looking for perfumes reminiscent of specific experiences. When someone asks for a fragrance that smells like petrichor, I assume they want to smell like the world after rain, washed-clean, like the hour after crying hard and then feeling better. I want this, too, and there are some good answers for it - Demeter’s Thunderstorm, for instance, and its grown-up successor, CB I Hate Perfume’s Black March. Almost all of Carner Barcelona’s scents have an echo of petrichor, as the brand’s particular chemical accord smells, to me anyway, like a blacktop after rain. Comme des Garcons’ Tar offers a different version of it, how the aftermath of rain lifts the smells of asphalt and gas stations, freshly laid roads and empty parking lots.

But the thing I want is greener and heavier and more immediate, the way the water sloughs off obligation, the way it makes interior spaces matter. One that comes close is DS & Durga’s Debaser, a fragrance well-known enough that it might be easy to overlook its spunky, sexy, wet-leaf genius. Fig is a fruit and not a green scent, but nevertheless fig runs close to what I mean when I talk about that camera-saturated landscape green, the pleasurable horror of a highway overtaken by mountains of kudzu. Fig is too much, a sweetness that wants something from you, a bargain in which nothing is free, a house choked off from the world by green-glowing vines crawling up the window panes and getting in between the stones. Debaser is fig hidden under large green leaves, warmed up by creepy-slutty coconut and tonka bean. Everything around its rotten-sweet center blooms green, grass and leaves and pear stem and moss. Rainstorms are often weirdly sexual, something out of a movie, wet white t-shirts and urgency, and this fragrance is a mildly sinister indulgence in much the same way.

Another scent that almost-but-not-quite does it is by Nanadebary (a tiny Austrian perfume brand using all natural ingredients) and is simply named “Green.” I was skeptical, first because I hate the bottle design and second because the opening is all citrus and I found it initially boring. But I put it on last week while it poured rain outside. After maybe half an hour I smelled my wrist again and it smelled like being on a fast-moving train during exactly this kind of rainy green summer day, cutting through an over-saturated landscape while grey water pours fast down the window and the train barrels toward the sea. It smelled like that drive to Savannah, the cup of coffee in my hands, the warm sweatshirt, the wild green wind outside and the air conditioner blasting inside, making our way from the road to the ocean, pouring green right down off the road into the coast. It smelled like rain and like being safe from rain, like surrendering to the outdoors, and like coming inside from it. Its main heart note is basil and at its center it smells greenly skeptical, staying inside, talking to no one. It’s not quite the thing I’m looking for, but I’m going to wear it all summer, and somewhere exactly halfway between it and Debaser is what I really mean.

Honorable mentions: In The Summer Kitchen, CB I Hate Perfume; Dirty Fig, Heretic; Miller et Bertaux, Green Green Green and Green; Profumum, Ichnusa. Please tell me your favorite weird rain-soaked green scents! I want all of them. —HF