The shelf(ie) didn’t create the love affair
In thinking about my lifelong love affair with perfume, I can’t help but think it began with my grandmothers.
I’m not even sure my Nana, my dad’s mom, wore a specific perfume. In all honesty, I can’t remember what she smelled like. To me, she just smelled like Nana.
What I can recall are her pursed lips, her white coiffed hair, her beautiful smile, the way she would grasp her chest and say, “Oh mon Dieu,” and her collection of antique perfume bottles. So many beautiful pieces.
I can picture them even now.
I don’t even know if they held fragrance, but they were glass and crystal, in varying colors, shapes and sizes, and they lived upon the tall antique mahogany dresser in her bedroom, the one with the lace doily. A Victorian mirror hung on the wall above it, overlooking her sterling silver hairbrush and comb set, a crystal powder jar with its matching fluffy powder puff, and that collection of perfume bottles.
Maybe there were five. Maybe there were fifteen. I can’t place the number anymore.
I only remember that I loved them. Coveted them.
My little-girl hands loved touching all of those boudoir accoutrements, feeling the tiny glass flacons, some with stoppers, others with vintage-style bulb atomizers. They were glamorous and elegant, with pieces from historic luxury houses like Lalique, Baccarat, Hoffmann and Guerlain.
I would swing around the posts of her four-poster bed, dab my face with her powder puff, breathing in that sweet, musky mix of clean, earthy talc, and touch crystal dabbers to the inside of my wrists. I’d twirl around the room pumping the rubber bulbs of atomizers covered in mesh or ornate fabric, some finished with golden tassels.
If my Nana only knew the hours I spent in her room playing with her perfume bottles.
And then there was my Karkey, my mom’s mom.
Statuesque, a former model, always with a Benson & Hedges Lights 100 between her lips, a gold charm bracelet jingling on her wrist, and the enveloping warmth of Shalimar drifting from her body and clothes.
She was pure glamour.
To this day, I adore Shalimar, with its legendary ambery, smoky vanilla character, housed in that iconic bottle with its curves and sapphire-blue stopper.
But my emotional attachment to Shalimar bypasses all logic. It is profoundly connected to memory, to family, and to the beginning of my love affair with fragrance.
My own mother wore Chanel No. 5 in my early years.
To me, it’s so much more than a perfume. It’s a time machine, one that transports me back to being held by my mom, something I have longed for since her passing in June 2024.
When I smell Chanel No. 5 today, something profound happens. There is a comforting, safe presence to it. It cradles me for a moment and connects me to long-lost memories of childhood.
And apparently, my passion for perfume stretched beyond the actual perfume.
I remember trading stickers with the girls in my neighborhood and desperately wanting the scratch-and-sniff Chanel No. 5 sticker. Even when they didn’t smell, I wanted the stickers shaped like perfume bottles—the wonderfully ridiculous, very ’80s vanity bottles. Their shapes, their designs, whether whimsical or scented—I loved collecting them even then.
Throughout my teens and young adulthood, I would fade in and out of love with perfume.
I’d steal a few sprays of whatever my mom had in rotation, sneak some Drakkar Noir from a boyfriend, and rub the magazine tear-outs of Obsession for Men or Eternity onto my wrists. During a brief hippie phase, I even wore patchouli oil.
There was Ombre Rose, Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth, Elizabeth Arden Sunflowers, Tribù by Benetton—and really, if Linda Evangelista was in the campaign anytime between 1989 and 2015, chances are I was wearing it.
In my 20s and 30s, perfume became more of an accessory. Something I wore for a special occasion, and, if I’m being completely honest, something I used to cover up the fact that I had been smoking or drinking.
I didn’t have the emotional relationship with perfume that I do as a grown woman.
Back then, it was simply part of my landscape.
In Southern California in the late ’90s, there was Clinique Happy and Jean Paul Gaultier Classique in that frosted-glass bustier bottle. I mostly collected designer fragrances, maybe rotating between two or three in a collection of five or six.
And then I found Child.
Child became my signature scent throughout much of my 20s and 30s.
There would be others, Trish McEvoy, the ubiquitous Cucumber Melon body spray from Bath & Body Works, Juicy Couture, Kai, Jo Malone, but Child was “mine” for many, many years.
Which brings me to the obvious question:
What the hell happened?
How did I go from five or six perfumes to a collection of more than 400?
I keep asking myself that very same question.
Is it my grief? Was it the GLP-1? Is it my history with addiction? Was I influenced? Is it the thrill of the hunt? Or is it something deeper, more meaningful and more personal?
Maybe it’s some combination of all of it.
Because for me, fragrance is deeply rooted in memory, emotion, connection and identity.
I appreciate perfume as an art form—the craftsmanship, the history, the rare natural materials and the molecules created in laboratories. I’m fascinated by how a perfumer can take these materials and create something invisible that somehow makes us feel.
And then, of course, there are the bottles.
Vintage, designer, Art Deco, niche, I find the structures themselves moving. Their shapes. Their expression. Their aesthetic. Yes, the scent is essential, but I’m equally interested in the visual identity, storytelling, communication, packaging and bottle design.
It’s all part of the experience for me.
I am a deeply sensorial person. I’m drawn to how something looks, sounds, smells and feels, and perfume checks a whole lot of those boxes.
Curating a collection brings me incredible joy. The research. The discovery. The experience of smelling something for the first time. The revisiting of something I haven’t worn in years and discovering that either the perfume has changed, or maybe I have.
And sharing that journey online through Sooo Human has become deeply rewarding in a way I never anticipated.
I found a community I didn’t even know existed. Women and men from around the world, spanning ages and backgrounds, who can become just as enthusiastic about a particular note, an obscure fragrance house, a beautiful bottle, or a scent memory from 30 years ago, as I can.
And maybe that connection is part of the answer, too.
Whether I went looking for this or stumbled into it, or whether, in some way, I was led here by something greater than myself—fragrance has given me a creative outlet, an admittedly expensive passion project, and, more than anything, deep emotional connections rooted in scent.
When I look at my shelves now, I don’t just see 400-plus bottles of perfume.
I see my Nana’s mahogany dresser and those tiny glass flacons I wasn’t supposed to touch.
I see Karkey, cigarette in hand, her charm bracelet jingling and Shalimar trailing behind her.
I feel my mother holding me, wrapped in Chanel No. 5.
I see different versions of myself, too—the little girl fascinated by perfume bottles, the teenager rubbing fragrance ads on her wrists, the 20-something in Southern California wearing Child, and the woman I am now, still endlessly curious about what scent can hold.
I don’t think I’m simply collecting perfume anymore. I’m curating the whole experience of it, the object, the scent, the artistry, the story, the memory, the person I was when I found it, and sometimes, the person it brings back to me.
I guess my fragrance story would read something like this: First, I was captivated by the bottles. Then I fell in love with the smells. Over time, those smells became memories. And somewhere along the way, I started curating all of it. Documenting it.
So maybe the 400-plus bottles aren’t quite as inexplicable as I thought. Maybe I’ve been building this collection my entire life.
The shelf(ie) didn’t create the love affair.
The shelf(ie) is evidence that the love affair was there all along.
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