Olfactory records

[j4]

At the junction at the bottom of Castle Hill a cyclist pulled up alongside me, and she smelt so strongly of the Body Shop's "Dewberry" range that I felt like I was a teenager again, worrying that using deodorant would make my parents think I was seeing boys (because why else would you want to smell nice or shave your legs?). I still hate that dewberry scent; it's like boiled sweets without the tastiness, or flowers without the naturalness, or summer holidays without friends. (I thought for ages that it was a made-up fruit, but actually it's not.)

And as I walked along Sidney Street I passed a greasy-haired boy, undergraduate age I suppose (though they look so young and so on and so forth), who was standing by the wall and eating a pasty from a paper bag. Right at the moment when I passed him there was a huge papery pastryish munching sound, and I got a hot blast of the smells of lard-soaked pastry and gristly meat.

I think on balance I preferred the pasty to the dewberry, which probably says something about me.

Not something very interesting, though. But never mind.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Excess perfume is pretty low on my list of pleasant smells. (I don't know if the examples I'm familiar with are particularly sought-after or teenagery or what, I know next to nothing of the species.)

[uon.livejournal.com]

There is a certain Body Shop fragrance which will instantly propel me back to when I was seventeen for, well, the usual reasons.
I don't mind the smell in and of itself, but even today, if I encounter someone wearing it I'll usually try to make some kind of excuse to get away, it's so intensely distracting.

[anat0010.livejournal.com]

I get olfactory hallucinations. Very strange indeed.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Mmm, pie-flavoured deodorant...

There's a perfume mostly used by young ladies in the early nineties that I adore, but I was awkward enough at that age that you can't really ask what it is, and now it seems to have mostly died out, I perhaps catch it on a stranger in the street once a year or so, and possibly not even that now.

[missjudas.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, that Dewberry spray takes me back to high school too. That, and White Musk, which someone had recently sprayed in the bathroom at work today when I went in there. Odd how smells can instantly transport you to another time and place.

[taimatsu]

White musk is one of the few not-obviously-noisome smells I really can't stand. Ick ick ick.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I think that it's the sense most tied to memory, in fact.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, we were talking about Dewberry and how vile it was at the Kristin gig last night. The overwhelming consensus was that white musk was the wise option if you were going to rock Body Shop perfumes.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Hang on! Dewberry's real? Oh wow. Well, I've learnt something today!

Mind, I would never have said the smell was blackberries.