Victoria’s Secret cucumber and green tea body spray makes me feel sick. Not because it has an unpleasant smell — the fresh, flowery scent was about as good as any fragrance that my 17-year-old self could have picked from the shelves of PINK while shopping before I moved for college. To get a new perfume is to commit; it’s like choosing the olfactory soundtrack for the next several months of your life.
Our sense of smell is heavily connected to emotions and memories. This is because the primary olfactory cortex — a part of the brain concerned with smell — is closely related to the amygdala, which processes emotional memories. The act of smelling something can directly affect our emotions. Smells constantly take me back to little slices of my life buried in my subconscious. Dry erase marker and acrylic carpet bring me to the small classroom where I spent first grade. Damp concrete and the dustiness of a space heater take me to the basement of the old house I grew up in.
Perfume is a special kind of smell — it’s on you, always, present in the back of your mind for the chunk of your life in which you wear it. Instead of taking me back to places, perfume takes me back to periods.
The period of my life following my cucumber body spray purchase is not one I look back on fondly. My transition to college was turbulent; I moved away from my family and the majority of my friends with little motivation to connect with others at my new school. Mental struggles and imposter syndrome worsened this adjustment, so I spent my first semester feeling anxious in my dorm room and eating alone in the dining halls.
By the next fall, I was working to distance myself from my freshman year, and new perfumes found their way onto my wrists and neck. Gucci Flora’s sweet lavender scent was my last year of being a teenager, living in Kerrytown and journaling away the sadness the previous year had left me with. Tom Ford Black Orchid’s warm, earthy smell was finding a major I loved and making new friends. I had finally found myself happy and self-assured, and my new, mature scents reflected that.
A few months ago, while looking for a container of thumbtacks under my bed, I came across a Victoria’s Secret bottle. I hadn’t sprayed it in nearly two years, and it was still halfway full of translucent green liquid. I popped off the gold plastic lid, smelled it, and felt the old tightness in my chest and the weight in my head reappear. I quickly put the lid back on, overcome with the emotions I had spent so much time trying to forget. I was taken aback by how easily they had returned.
The intense, immediate power perfume has over emotion is something that never ceases to impress and scare me. It also made me sad — for all the progress I had made mentally, I was still only one spray away from the feelings I had escaped.
I took out the bottle a few days later and sprayed it into the air of my room. The dull pain in my stomach returned, but I drew a deep breath. I took in everything I had. The place I was in. I set the bottle next to the new perfume that sat on my shelf.
Two years later, though, the smell of that body spray still reawakens some of those negative emotions, they’re no longer as powerful. The connection between the scent and that difficult time in my life has weakened, and maybe one day it will disappear. Perfume is the physical embodiment of the phrase “progress isn’t linear.” Sometimes, smelling it brings me back to where I started. Now, I will also have the experience to know how to handle those feelings and the knowledge that they aren’t permanent. Memories can be reshaped; emotional memory doesn’t have to be stagnant. One day, maybe, the Victoria’s Secret body spray will remind me of the joy I feel now.
Daily Arts Writer Cecilia Dore can be reached at cecedore@umich.edu.