I would like to smell like an orange

I remember when I was small, I didn’t like oranges. My mom would chase me around with them, yelling about malnutrition. I’d hand off whatever I had to my brother and try to forget the fruit existed in any incarnation.

Then one day, at my grandmother’s old house, she peeled the biggest, juiciest orange I had ever smelled. She broke the mottled green skin with her thumbnail, and I had never smelled anything like it. I wanted it.

I’m pretty sure that started my relationship with scent.

Perfume didn't really arrive in one day. Much like anyone else, perfume came to me through hugs from my father and his floor-to-ceiling shelf of fascinating bottles. Through the crush of family events where Shalimar, White Diamonds, and Jardiance mingled with skin, cigar smoke, and something that always seemed suspiciously like very strong tuberose. Through watching my mother put on that one weirdly fuchsia lipstick before spraying herself with something rosy enough to linger in a room long after she had left it. So I decided I would like to smell like an orange too.

Long before I understood notes or accords, I understood that people could leave smells behind.

Learning to speak in scent

The idea that I could use perfume to smell like something came to me through my uncle. At that point, I wanted something chic and possibly cucumber. My old-school uncle decided those must be terrible ideas and gave a ten-year-old Pleasure instead, which became the beginning of our own ritual.

Every perfume I wore from about ten to nineteen came from him. He would ask, “What do you smell like today?” because the names of the perfumes were apparently too hard to remember, so we discussed what they smelled like instead. Not oud, moss or neroli. What they actually smelled like.

Lolita Lempicka smelled like The Addams Family. I still stand by it, no notes, thank you. Jardiance smelled like Roman Holiday — this was my uncle’s contribution — and Pleasure smelled like this odd little type of rose he had smuggled in from abroad called fairy roses. There were other perfumes, some hits and other misses, but none quite as memorable.

When I was seventeen, he gave me Miss Dior Chérie — the only perfume I have ever repeatedly bought. I wore it to school and got snapped at for it. I wore it to bed. I wore it outside. Slowly, it seeped into the memories of everything that happened during those years. Class. School. A Levels. It smelled like people, emotions, highs and lows, and like a Parisian spring — that last part, too, was my uncle.

Dior discontinued Chérie at some point, and I have been chasing that high ever since.

To relive it. To see if I could revive those conversations that passed with him. To smell that very specific blend that should, theoretically, be some combination of strawberry, caramel, patchouli, and popcorn, I have been fishing, often blindly.

Coco Mademoiselle EDT: conceptually similar, spiritually bereft.

La Nuit Trésor: all I smelled was incense — often that horribly strong kind you’d smell if you walked into a store somewhere selling ethnicity as fashion.

Burberry Her: I don’t like Burberry, and this held true. It is similar if you watered down Chérie and then added a lot of that chemically strong maraschino-cherry smell you’d find on every birthday cake in the ’90s.

If you go indie, Le Galion’s Bourrasque smells good, but nothing remotely close. Meleg’s Very Cherry Rose is fascinating because it has very similar notes, but on the skin, they barely speak the same language.

I am still on the hunt. I haven’t given up. If anyone finds anything, do let me know.

Returning to the orange

Maybe that is why I eventually went back to basics.

I was going to smell like an orange.

Not vaguely citrusy. Not clean. Not bright. An actual orange — picked fresh from a tree somewhere along the Mediterranean, its skin broken open by impatient thumbs.

And, happily, I found it.

Jo Malone’s Orange Blossom gives me the flower. Acqua di Parma’s Arancia di Capri gives me the flesh and the peel. Neither smells like a walking vitamin C tablet.

You are just a gorgeous, juicy little orange.

Maybe that was what I had been looking for all along. Not a perfume that could resurrect the past just the way I remembered it, but one that could take me back to the first time scent made me want to become something else.

My search is not over. It probably never will be. I’ll keep stocking the shelves, smelling everything, looking for Chérie in places it almost certainly isn’t.

But for now, being a fruit feels calming somehow.