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(M)A somewhat personal story with Guerlain's Vetiver
It was the Easter of 1984.
Amid blooming spring flowers of all colours and shapes and with the cheerful twittering of birds and buzzing of bees in my ears, I was standing - not yet 15 years old - in the midday sun on the lean meadow in the garden in front of the house in which I grew up.
In my hand I held the perfume sample set that I had just received from my mother. I sprayed a splash of Guerlain's randomly chosen Eau de Toilette Vetiver on my wrist when I suddenly realized that the smell of spring could be captured and that this was exactly what had happened here. It was the most sublime smell I had ever noticed.
In the years that followed, I tested different perfumes again and again, but none touched me like this. At some point I bought a real perfume bottle of Guerlain's Vetiver - I still remember the black grooves on the bottom of the golden cap that was on the bottle at that time. So it became my first signature fragrance and remained so for the next 10 years.
In the first year of the new century, when I was thirty, I lost my sense of smell due to a severe craniocerebral trauma (SHT). Some difficult years passed in which I was afraid that I would never be able to smell again - just as it happens to almost all people whose Fila olfactoria is completely sheared off by a SHT. I no longer used perfume because I couldn't bear the fact that I couldn't smell it myself. At that time I had the everlasting, madly sad feeling of playing in a (wrong) film and not really living at all.
At some point during a particularly hard winter - I will never forget this happy moment - the depressing film became my life again: Suddenly I could at least perceive individual components of odours again. First, the city where I lived smelled unexpectedly and unmistakably like burnt wood that people apparently used for heating - which strangely enough had escaped me completely in the winters before my anosmia.
In the course of the next maybe five years, the steadily increasing number of individual scents that I perceived, such as jigsaw puzzles, came together more and more to form complete - and familiar to me from earlier - scent bouquets. While the smell of lilies, for example, had reminded me most of machine oil at first, as time went by I recognized its characteristic scent better and better; just as it had dormant in my memory.
Finally, at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, I was firmly convinced that I could again perceive all smells exactly as they really smell: Everything smelled and smelled - just like before. As we can still see, however, with one important exception.
*
I just had a longer flight behind me as I walked along the airport's duty-free perfumery and Vetiver came to mind again. Desiring to refresh and delight myself with the scent of the captured spring, which I missed so painfully for more than twenty years, I headed directly to the Eau de Toilette Guerlains Vetiver.
But my shock could hardly have been greater. What I smelled was not the expected happiness in spring, but a stale, musty smell that I (if I may say so) found repulsive and most likely associated with hyperacidity due to age or illness.
I was already afraid that my sense of smell had not completely regenerated after all. On Parfumo, however, I learned to my relief that my completely different impression of Vetiver might not have been due to my still damaged sense of smell, but rather to a completely misguided reformulation - after all, the scent was obviously already reformulated several times and I was apparently not the only one who found Guerlain's current Vetiver musty and (euphemistically speaking:) unappealing.
Meanwhile I believe that especially Lubins Le Vetiver smells quite similar to the spring luck of Guerlains former Vetiver which I smelled in the 80s: At least for me it is comparably green, fresh and spicy. And also Vétiver Extraordinaire by Malle reminds me clearly of my wonderful scent experience of 1984, but the delicate floral-animalic note, which I also think I smelled in the background at the time, I search in vain in both.
If one is currently looking on the relevant websites (e.g. Osmoz or Scentdirect) for the scents of Guerlains Vetiver (Eau de Cologne, which seems to be the archetype of the scent in question) from 1959, then in fact floral and animal notes are also mentioned, such as violet, carnation or civet. Pepper is missing completely, but also myrrh, amber and sandalwood are mentioned, and overall the scent image that is created in my head is much more consistent with the grandiose spring scent that I remember.
At some point I will take a sample of the original formulation of Guerlain's Vetiver and hopefully be able to smell and release the captured spring happiness again - maybe it has survived the many years in the bottle and I smell the world the way it really smells..
Amid blooming spring flowers of all colours and shapes and with the cheerful twittering of birds and buzzing of bees in my ears, I was standing - not yet 15 years old - in the midday sun on the lean meadow in the garden in front of the house in which I grew up.
In my hand I held the perfume sample set that I had just received from my mother. I sprayed a splash of Guerlain's randomly chosen Eau de Toilette Vetiver on my wrist when I suddenly realized that the smell of spring could be captured and that this was exactly what had happened here. It was the most sublime smell I had ever noticed.
In the years that followed, I tested different perfumes again and again, but none touched me like this. At some point I bought a real perfume bottle of Guerlain's Vetiver - I still remember the black grooves on the bottom of the golden cap that was on the bottle at that time. So it became my first signature fragrance and remained so for the next 10 years.
In the first year of the new century, when I was thirty, I lost my sense of smell due to a severe craniocerebral trauma (SHT). Some difficult years passed in which I was afraid that I would never be able to smell again - just as it happens to almost all people whose Fila olfactoria is completely sheared off by a SHT. I no longer used perfume because I couldn't bear the fact that I couldn't smell it myself. At that time I had the everlasting, madly sad feeling of playing in a (wrong) film and not really living at all.
At some point during a particularly hard winter - I will never forget this happy moment - the depressing film became my life again: Suddenly I could at least perceive individual components of odours again. First, the city where I lived smelled unexpectedly and unmistakably like burnt wood that people apparently used for heating - which strangely enough had escaped me completely in the winters before my anosmia.
In the course of the next maybe five years, the steadily increasing number of individual scents that I perceived, such as jigsaw puzzles, came together more and more to form complete - and familiar to me from earlier - scent bouquets. While the smell of lilies, for example, had reminded me most of machine oil at first, as time went by I recognized its characteristic scent better and better; just as it had dormant in my memory.
Finally, at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, I was firmly convinced that I could again perceive all smells exactly as they really smell: Everything smelled and smelled - just like before. As we can still see, however, with one important exception.
*
I just had a longer flight behind me as I walked along the airport's duty-free perfumery and Vetiver came to mind again. Desiring to refresh and delight myself with the scent of the captured spring, which I missed so painfully for more than twenty years, I headed directly to the Eau de Toilette Guerlains Vetiver.
But my shock could hardly have been greater. What I smelled was not the expected happiness in spring, but a stale, musty smell that I (if I may say so) found repulsive and most likely associated with hyperacidity due to age or illness.
I was already afraid that my sense of smell had not completely regenerated after all. On Parfumo, however, I learned to my relief that my completely different impression of Vetiver might not have been due to my still damaged sense of smell, but rather to a completely misguided reformulation - after all, the scent was obviously already reformulated several times and I was apparently not the only one who found Guerlain's current Vetiver musty and (euphemistically speaking:) unappealing.
Meanwhile I believe that especially Lubins Le Vetiver smells quite similar to the spring luck of Guerlains former Vetiver which I smelled in the 80s: At least for me it is comparably green, fresh and spicy. And also Vétiver Extraordinaire by Malle reminds me clearly of my wonderful scent experience of 1984, but the delicate floral-animalic note, which I also think I smelled in the background at the time, I search in vain in both.
If one is currently looking on the relevant websites (e.g. Osmoz or Scentdirect) for the scents of Guerlains Vetiver (Eau de Cologne, which seems to be the archetype of the scent in question) from 1959, then in fact floral and animal notes are also mentioned, such as violet, carnation or civet. Pepper is missing completely, but also myrrh, amber and sandalwood are mentioned, and overall the scent image that is created in my head is much more consistent with the grandiose spring scent that I remember.
At some point I will take a sample of the original formulation of Guerlain's Vetiver and hopefully be able to smell and release the captured spring happiness again - maybe it has survived the many years in the bottle and I smell the world the way it really smells..
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