Odors are so weird and interesting. I've had times (well, a while ago, lately I am, well, not-so-active) when I've thought someone was super cute and cool, and I really loved the idea of being involved with them. But then I found that they smelled weird. Not bad. Not smelly. But weird-to-me. So no matter how much I tried to talk myself into it, I just couldn't go forward. Because of the weird-to-me smell.

I've had that happen -- specifically with a female friend who I think very highly of in a non-romantic way. I think it's her shampoo. Tweaked me out a bit, and I let her know; fortunately, she wasn't (outwardly) freaked out.

I was thinking about this only today - I put on my perfume that I bought just before arriving in Paris, and now, every time I put it on I think of Paris. It took a while before I connected the the perfume with the thoughts of Paris.

I think smell is a pretty good sign to me of my level of attraction to someone... the more attracted I am to them, the better they smell, but I think that's more pheromones than me only liking nice smelling people!

It can work the other way too. My dad used to wear Old Spice. One whiff of that and I'm ten years old again and right back in the terror.

When I was a divorce lawyer I had to transfer a client to a colleague because he wore Old Spice.

That's sad, ej. Certain flavors of pipe smoke is my instant dad conjurer, but it's a good thing.

One can also be jolted by your own past scents. I wore "First" by Van Cleef and Arpels for years and years, and I smelled it on someone recently and got a dizzy head rush and bittersweet nostalgia. Very disorienting.

Oh, my, I've almost made this post before. There's a someone I meet frequently that smells exactly like an old someone I miss with all my heart. It's so strong, and it drives me just about crazy, and I can't do anything about it; well, 'least not what I wanna do. Like right there on the spot.

I once worked with a man who smelled like my high school boyfriend (the one I didn't care about, not the one who broke my heart). Until I figured that out, it drove me crazy, wondering why I was all the time thinking I was back in Southern California.

(as an aside, spork, an ex of mine used "spork" as an online name for a while. so!)

i once had to sit next to a kid on the bus who smelled like hamster food. Luckily, this triggers nothing for me.
i hunt out scents that can evoke memories. They tend to be more of an enveloping or physical recollection, but i can't think of too many. Like songs that lose the taint of when you heard last them, during that break up or that grade in school, and they're neutralized.
That certain incense they use to use in your garden variety headshop trinket music place is too diluted now. Cloves have a hazy attachment to the turn of the 90s.

i'd like to find this chocolate lotion, that, yes, smelled like chocolate and something that will substitute what was only called light musk on a tiny glass bottle from some long dead boutique in California.
i need some freesia and lavender.
Everything needs a freshening up.
Or a fire.

There's a place here that has chocolate lotion, that seems to me to smell of chocolate (though I suspect I'm not terribly demanding on the chocolate scent thing). I'll send you some if you like, eth.

I also have one of those lovely, musk never-to-be-exactly-reproduced scent memories, from a tiny bottle that I got in Nashville, of all places on earth. It was called something like "China Rain", or... I don't know, China something. More specific than "light musk", but I never found it again, despite scents with almost/or-even-exactly the same name. It might as well have been called "Somethin-Somethin Musk".

I've had the smell thing go the other way, too. I worked in a chocolate store in high school, and in the back there was a radio that was always on. I lived in Buffalo but listened to a Toronto station called CFNY. They played a lot of good stuff, and of course a lot of Canadian stuff. There have been times when I've heard a song I associate with that station and that time, and I'll smell chocolate. Really smell it. It's pretty amazing.

For some reason one of those songs is How Soon is Now by the Smiths. Or just about anything by Leonard Cohen.

Whenever I put sunblock on, the smell reminds me of my trip to Argentina last February. Maybe it's just the heightened receptivity to experience that one gets when traveling to a new place, but maybe it's also the fact that it's pretty unusual for me to be putting on sunblock when it's February.