THE WORLD IS A STAGE

YOU CAN LIE WITH YOUR WORDS, BUT NOT WITH YOUR SCENT

JACQUELINE LAIN

May 8, 2025

She remembers scent the way others remember lovers. A stairwell, a kiss, a Paris hotel hallway—each traced in perfume. In this quietly dazzling essay, iconic perfume critic Jacqueline Lain returns from decades of silence to write about memory, disappearance, and the fragrances that outlast us. What follows is not a history of perfume, but something more intimate: a testament to what lingers.

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I remember the exact smell of the stairwell in our first apartment: old wood and metal, wilted eucalyptus, dusty windowsills, and something moldy and rotten. I was four, maybe five. We had a cat named Plato. The landlord’s wife wore too much Shalimar and smoked in the elevator. These things are not unrelated.

Smell, unlike sight or sound, does not pretend to be objective. It insists. It reappears without warning. It’s the ghost in the hotel corridor, the stranger who wore your mother’s perfume, the reason you can’t visit that café anymore. Smell lingers, and then it waits. This is my catalogue. A bouquet of scents, both literal and not. 

The perfumes of my life: Ybry Mon Ame (1925): Smelled like champagne regrets and cigarette burns in the back seat

Smell is what happens to memory when no one is watching.

The first boy I loved wore a citrusy deodorant and smoked clove cigarettes. When we kissed, I tasted bergamot and asphalt. A decade later, I smelled the same combination on a man in Madrid and nearly burst into tears. He looked nothing like the boy. He was older, thinner, meaner. But he carried something I thought I’d lost: the ability to be caught off guard by memory.

No one teaches you that you will spend the rest of your life catching faint glimpses of other lives you once lived, and that scent is often the way back.

I have chased smells through hotel lobbies and department stores. I have followed the perfume trail of a woman on a train until she got off at a stop I didn’t know. I have asked strangers what they are wearing. I have ordered samples from brands I cannot pronounce. I am not ashamed of this. I am trying to remember who I was. 

The perfumes of my life: Lanvin Arpège (1927): The scent of piano lessons, pearls, and promises nobody kept

The world, of course, does not care about smell. We have worked hard to contain it, to sanitize it, to build over it. We spray it out of bathrooms and cars, burn it in candles, and silence it with air conditioning. We cover the smell of bodies and call that progress, but it is not. It is repression by aerosol.

The city I live in now smells like a pharmaceutical advertisement: clean, scrubbed, a little too minty. I can smell loneliness in my building. I can smell old anger in thrift stores. I can smell ambition in offices, and grief in stairwells. I trust these things more than I trust people.

Which brings me to the last socially sanctioned form of smelling someone on purpose: perfume. It is how we choose to haunt one another. An intentional aura, a scented signature, it says: This is what I want you to remember about me. 

The perfumes of my life: Givenchy L’Interdit (1957): Like sneaking out the window in your mother’s best dress

Most commercial perfumes are too eager to please. They wear glitter and smile too hard. But there are others, almost in hiding—those are different. They whisper. They insinuate. They resist summary. I’ve been wearing a handful lately, letting them lead me through days like peculiar guides.

Like old film reels and ballroom echoes, Columbine (Ciro) enters with posture, all powder and smoke, then softens like silk gloves left behind on a train. It’s the kind of scent you notice more after it’s gone.

My favorite recently, more secret than scent, Golden Hour Light (Shishl) doesn’t announce itself, at least not at first. You only notice it in the second hour, after you’ve touched your own wrist and wondered what’s changed. It smells like the light between blinds, the hush before a letter is opened. A perfume for people who speak quietly and mean it.

Something about Amberlievable (Astro Phil and Stella) feels extraterrestrial—not the cold of space, but the warmth of retro science fiction, the kind that still believes in love. I wore it once to a dinner party and felt like I could speak fluent starlight. It’s what I imagine a comet might wear to impress the moon.

Then there’s Hypnorange (Coreterno)—brash, joyful, completely unreliable. It starts like citrus and gasoline, then flips into something floral and defiant. It’s the scent of someone you meet on a plane and never forget, even though you never found out their name. A dare in liquid form.

Patience is required for Burgundy Oud (Atelier Materi). It smells like stone and wood and the shadow of something earthy. It says: Stay still. It says: I know you’re lying. You wear it when you need to feel grounded, when you don’t want to be touched but wouldn’t mind being seen. It’s what integrity might smell like if it had a pulse.

Finally, Thousand Lakes (Visiteur) arrives quietly. It smells like absence. Like fog. Like the echo of someone who left something behind on purpose. It lingers in coats, in books, in borrowed rooms. It doesn’t belong to anyone, and that’s the point. A scent that waits in doorways but never comes in. 

The perfumes of my life: Caron Nuit de Noël (1920): Midnight mass, too much cognac, and a kiss you regretted by New Year’s

I do not believe in personality tests, but I believe in perfume. You can lie with your words, but not with your scent. A man I loved wore Tabacco Toscano by Santa Maria Novella, and when I smell it now, I still flinch. He wore it badly. It was too much on him. I realize now that he used it as camouflage.

I want a perfume that tells the truth. That doesn’t flatter. That waits until the second act to show its real character. I want a scent that forgets itself halfway through and then remembers with a vengeance.

We live in a world that is losing its sense of smell. Not just because of viruses and digital life, but because we are trained to look away from anything not immediately useful. Smell takes time. Smell is analog. Smell cannot be screenshotted or optimized. 

The perfumes of my life: Yardley Lavender (1950): Clean sheets, clean conscience, and just a hint of wanting trouble anyway

When I write about perfume, I write about grief, desire, and identity. I write about the shirt I kept for years because it smelled like someone I loved. I write about the sweater I burned. About the soap that smells like my grandmother’s kitchen. About the hallway in a Paris hotel where someone passed by and left a trail of vetiver and cigarette smoke that made me question everything I thought I had healed from.

Sometimes I wear perfume just to feel real. To leave a trace. To remind myself that I am not yet finished. That I am still here. That I have not disappeared entirely.

Smell is the last place memory hides. The last sense to go. The most faithful ghost.

I keep them all lined up on a wooden tray. My little bottles of time. A constellation of selves. Some mornings, I spray something on and wait for someone I used to be to come back. Sometimes she does.

Sometimes she doesn’t.

But the scent remains.

Jacqueline Lain (b. 1938 in Paris) studied olfactive composition at the legendary Conservatoire des Parfums Oubliés in Grasse, a hillside town in southern France where the air still carries traces of jasmine, leather, and myth. Once the head perfume critic at L’Officieuse de la Couture et de la Mode de Paris, she now lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she writes about lost time. This is her first essay in two decades.

Cover image: Born in 1925: Guerlain Shalimar