Sea scent and French perfume

 

This blog starts with my friend Veronica Vazeri, an artist, former diplomat and currently founder of a school dedicated to studying the complexity of human relations. She has studied business administration, is a relationship coach and currently studies psychology. I met Veronica in a glorious late summer day in Bologna, after a morning of museums and gelatos in the medieval city centre. We were connecting to travel together to Rimini, as we were both taking Salaam’s perfumery course. We hit it off immediately, bonding initially over the challenges of buying a train ticket from the ticket machines and then sharing our anxiety regarding the course. Our travels took longer than we planned due to the unexpected strike of railroad workers and in the 4 hours it took us to reach the destination we became fast friends. We laughed endlessly in our time in Coriano, mostly at ourselves with the occasional others thrown in. She is not as much as a fragrance obsessive as many of us are (Oh Jeremy where are thou?) for she is too cool headed to obsess over pretty much anything other than human psyche. Since we parted in Coriano, she lived in Venice and has then moved to Bahrain where she is setting up her olfactory psychology business. While her present endeavours are fascinating, I asked Veronika about the smells of her childhood and got a lovely trip down the communist rabbit hole.

Seaweed and sage brush

I grew up in Schevchenko, formerly in the USSR now renamed now Aktau and located in Kazakhstan, until 16, when my family moved to Ukraine. Schevchenko was a special city, as all cities by the sea tend to be. The smell of the city was that of the Caspian sea:  the smell of seaweed, of sand, sea breeze and seagulls.  The scent of sea was very strong, because there the sea is full of greenery, of seaweed which give sit a very distinct smell, unlike the sea in Bahrain for instance – clearer and less smelly. For me the smell of sea is primordial, it was actually the first smell I asked our perfumery instructor if I can reproduce (it’s possible, using seaweed, and playing with other salty smelling ingredients). Sea was very special, we used to go swimming every day, without sun protection as there were no sun blocking lotions. So, I have no memory of a certain sun lotion or creme as many people in Western world seem to have. The city was a located between the sea and the desert without much greenery. I remember primarily the scent of a desert plant, sage brush smelling of a combination of lavender and sage, which scented the air once the sea was behind.

Linden trees and apples

Every summer we used to travelled to Ukraine to our grandparents who lived in a village, and they had beautiful scents, much different than at home, of linden blossoms and apples from the apple trees.

Mandarines and oranges

In Schevchenko, around New Year,  it was the only time when mandarins and oranges were available to buy, as a Christmas treat. I remember their smell well and to this day the smell of mandarins gives me a festive mood.

 

It’s French ..you are spoiling me

My mother was a rare bird for she managed somehow to acquire some fine French perfumes, which was very unusual for the time because these were not freely available in communist country. Through complex transactions she came into possession of several classics: I remember first and foremost her  Diorissimo, which she loved for she was a big fan of lily of the valley and of jasmine. She also had Dior’s Poison and Chanel 5. French fragrances were refined while the famous Soviet brand Nova Zaria was known to produce fragrances that were very strong, and for this reason not that  popular. My mother also had some nice Zintars  fragrances but I just cannot recall any in particular. Fragrance was offered for birthdays, special occasions and was considered a rare treat, particularly if the products were from France. The profile of French perfumes was raised even further due to a great film from 1976, Irony of destiny (S liogkim Parom) who was regularly shown every single year on the TV in the New Years Eve special broadcast. A character from this film gets a perfume from her fiancée and says It’s such a precious gift, and it’s French as well, oh, you are spoiling me which is a phrase that is iconic to this day and entered popular culture.

Galanteria from UNIVERMAG

There was no shop dedicated to perfumes at the time, access to perfume was through a different supply chain, such as communist party specialist shops and occasionally even from the black market.  For general public, Fragrance, no more than one or two kinds, was sold in Haberdashery departments (Galanteria) together with soap, candles, limited choice of make-up, stockings, hair pins and other knick-knacks. These departments used to smell of soap or generic face powders and were in the department store named UNIVERMAG (short for universal shop), together with the shoes, hats and clothes departments. The shopping experience was very functional, people came and bought without lingering because there was no reason to linger and almost no merchandise to browse.

Impulse Pantera and other delights

For youngsters there was no culture of fragrance, I don’t remember having a scent of my own until I was quite grown up. people washed and that was enough not to smell badly, the concept of smelling nice was not something young people considered a lot. Once I started university in Ukraine, where we moved when I turned 16, University the perfumed deodorants were much in vogue. Unlike today when body deodorants are mostly mildly or not at all scented, our deodorants doubled as fragrance. Most popular were Fa, Impulse and Charlie, all strong and perfumy, used all over the body and hair to add extra oomph.

 

Then and now: tiger balm!

Our scented universe was not impacted by cleaning products because ,most were not scented, they were functional, and scent had no function! There were a few strong scents I remember though, and they are from the famous Tiger balm (a sort of universal panacea used for headaches and muscle pain), the Naftalin, stinky balls placed in wardrobes as protection against moths for the winter clothes. I remember this scent reaching me every time we opened the wardrobes of our beautiful, mahogany furniture imported from Romania (the instantly recognizable Regence model) which travelled with us to Ukraine and was a reliable companion for 30 years until the flat got sold with the furniture inside. Our scent universe feels like a time capsule today, with many of the familiar scents gone except in our memory.

 

Featured image from Pexels: Lachlan Ross