Scents of Those Who Love You

This is a paid for post

This week I learnt that the world's most expensive luxury perfume in 2001 was on sale for £143,000. A legacy of the Crown Perfumery, Clive Christian's No 1 Passant Guardant is a decorated in 24-carat golden latticed bottle and has precisely 2003 diamonds. The scent is supposedly boastful of plum and peaches in its initial layers, before descending into a playful, olfactory dream of cardamom and ylang ylang.

I could write about it as if I knew all about the art-making of perfumes, but who am I kidding? I am painfully limited in that area.

But you and I are fortunate enough to cling to the scents that stay with us for lifetimes to come. Warm souls who linger with an electrifying enthusiasm, in deep depths of the darkness, such howling of madness and affection, and then suddenly, a twinkle of hope: where land finally kisses the tumultuous sea in a sunny but stormy embrace. 

The most gratifying moments in life are often soul-wrenching: remember with half-aches and quarter-nostalgia the scents of those who leave you even before you part, but stained in your mind with the most clarity are those who love you most ferociously, and without pity. 

These are the scents of those who love you –

Top notes 

Sweet, faint Jasmine in pearls of beaded sweat,  many early days of running around in tall, itchy grass in a tropical country. The kitchen of spices: white grounded pepper, cumin, anise star! The love from braised beef and daikon with fluffy rice... Barley drinks, iced chocolate.

Heart notes

and the most important - kindness and more; full measures of honesty when you need it the most, the feelings that binds and unwinds your heart, in the deep summer with a garden of honeysuckle and roses, foolish mistakes made not once, not twice, but thrice; regrets which also smells like strong gin and forgiveness (maybe) but makes you a Better Person who loves and will be loved

Base notes 

A small but strong hero - the audacity of warmth on a harsh wintery day, sickly cinnamon and tangerines and surprisingly eggs (!), almost like a decade ago at an Indonesian volcano at dawn, like you were there with me before we even met. Deep and rich wine that makes perfect beef bourgingon, we intertwine 

This post is in collaboration with Clive Christian's new Private Collection of 10 perfumes, a celebration and inspiration of life's moments, personified in frames of time: the rhythm of ballet, royal mews and simply, the city of London.