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“Of the senses, smell is the one with the best memory.”
— Rebecca McClanahan

 

 

I walked into Sephora a few days ago, partly to check if the 12.12 sales were still on, but mostly to indulge the kind of hedonism that requires justification via markdown. Somewhere between overpriced serums and youth-in-a-bottle eye creams, I found myself in the perfume section. And there it was, the same perfume I used to obsessively wear five years ago, staring at me. I spritzed it onto my wrist, took a whiff and was immediately transported to a time of liberating days, reckless evenings and new sensations. I will not go into specifics, mostly because my mother might read this. But if I could give a mental picture of what it was, it was a timeline when I mentally, spiritually and physically unfriended the old version of me and chose to just let loose. Not in the literal sense. I miss that feeling. But also, I do not. I have outgrown that girl and frankly, she exhausts me now.

 

Over the years, I have developed a highly niche library of scent associations. Clorox? Hospital corridors and bedridden days. Durian, those days spent at Grandma’s orchard. Cigarette smoke? Friday nights in my twenties when I believed bad boys were misunderstood poets and required for my character development and when my liver cells regenerated limitlessly like Wolverine. Random cheap floral scent, those kiddy days spent sniffing my mother’s Avon catalogues. Victoria’s Secret body mist, the student era, when I could not afford perfume but still wanted to smell like fruit salad. Freshly baked cookies? Those late-night baking sessions with my mother before Eid, where half the dough ended up in my mouth. Scented erasers; childhood and simple maths I still cannot do. A certain detergent? That time I refused to buy a washing machine and got way too familiar with laundromat aunties. Vanilla candle? IKEA. Fresh linen; smells like adulthood trying to convince me everything’s fine. Firecracker smoke? Eid nights and cousins you barely talk to. Freshly cut grass or fresh lawn after rain? Semen. (Sorry, I don’t make the rules.) And then there’s Sean John’s ‘Unforgivable’, an intoxicating scent designed by a narcissist, for the narcissist(s), the kind that should have been your first red flag when you first started dating him but you had the ‘I could fix you’ mentality which should have come with a warning label on the bottle – “Will ruin your life, but you’ll think you’re the exception.”

The list goes on and on.

 

Which also reminds me of one peculiar incident I had when I was in boarding school. I was 13 and even after a week of being boarded, I had not expressed the slightest sign of separation anxiety. I convinced myself I was this big girl who did not miss the comfort of home or my parents because I was too cool to admit that. Then one evening, while I was having my shower just before prep class, I unpacked a new bar of soap that my mom had bought me. As I lathered it onto my skin, I started sobbing. I realized, in that moment, that I was homesick. Just because the scent of the soap reminded me of home and it was the same default soap we had always used in our bathrooms. I sobbed and sobbed, then jumped out of the shower, sappy and slightly soapy, gathered all my loose coins, and made my way to the nearest phone booth to call my father. It was 2003, and unlike these days, we had no access to mobile phones. If you needed to talk, you had to get dressed and walk about 300 meters to the hostel’s public phone booth to make contact with the outside world. You were lucky if there wasn’t a queue. So there I was. Sobbed again. Called him. He couldn’t brain it because just days before, I sounded so chill. Then I described what triggered the homesickness. There was a long pause. Then he said: “Okay, stay there. Your mother and I will figure this out.” Two hours later, they showed up at school. Concerned. Parents were not encouraged to visit on weekdays unless it was urgent or gravely important. My father, with his diplomatic charm, got away with it by telling the chief warden it was an emergency. An emergency it was. Only to learn later that I was labelled among the wardens as “that one student that got homesick because of a soap.”

 

So when Henry Jacques, the haute parfumerie contacted me recently for a private olfactory experience, I did not leap at the opportunity like I once might have.

One, for the obvious reason: I cannot afford it. And even if I could, I simply cannot justify spending the GDP of a small island nation on a 30ml bottle of scent, no matter how transcendent the bergamot. Especially not after they pamper you with such a lavish ceremony that makes you feel like royalty just before gently reminding you; you are, in fact, very much not.

 

Two, because I was genuinely afraid of what scent might undo me this time. I have been emotionally wrecked by a bar of soap before.

 

And three, because apparently, I was remembered. By the staff. Because the first time I approached them, long before the olfactory invitation, I asked a very specific question:

“So what does arrogance smell like?”

 

She was delighted.

Delighted enough not to respond immediately but to log that absurd request into their luxury CRM.

Delighted enough to later reach out and guide me, ever so seriously, to the one scent she believed truly embodied that remark. A scent I can only assume was crafted by extracting the sweats of billionaires, the tears of rejected heirs, or some other sinister-sounding thing no one questions when it is in French.

 

Mia M. Nor ©

20 December 2025

Kuala Lumpur.

 

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