The Scented Letter: It Takes Me Right Back

Lawrence’s fascination with fragrance began at a young age: he’d return from school trips, bags bulging with French Art Deco-designed eaux de Cologne and obscure Italian soaps. After a career devising product ranges for museum and galleries – he still consults for some of the major nationals – almost 10 years ago he decided to curate his own collection of things he loved, using his family name. Roullier White offers a vast selection of niche perfume brands, with Lawrence always looking for the next exciting thing. Lawrence is also published journalist writing about scent and his other passion, independent retailing. 

When helping customers in the store one of the first questions we ask them is what smells they like. Invariably it will be a smell from childhood, this may be because, hopefully, childhood memories are good ones. The more likely reason is that it is during these years that our olfactory references are collected and collated, the catalogue of mental files we flick through trying to place each scent as it breezes in and we subconsciously plan our response. I remember as a child marvelling at newly discovered smells (the vinyl and nylon head of my sister’s new doll) and who does not remember the smell of Play-doh or wax crayons? I would breathe them in time and time again trying to install them in my memory bank.

Of course not all smells evoke good memories, freshly polished wooden floors take me back immediately to the first day of term and makes me feel quite ill, even typing this my stomach turns. So it will not be surprising then that the times for me that are most filled with fond fragrant memories are those of our family summer holidays. We would pile into the Ford Anglia, mum and dad in the front (Je Reviens, Trumper’s Extract of Limes), my sister and me in the back (red leatherette, panting Labrador) and chug down the A roads (petrol, hawthorn) pausing in a layby (tea from a thermos flask, warm orange squash from Tupperware) until the first blast of sea air announced our arrival at our destination.

The next two weeks would be a complete adventure, an exhausting blur of activity and discovery. Rock pools (sea weed and sulphur) and woods (bark and pine needles), municipal gardens (lavender and marigolds) and cliff tops (chalk and grass), cinemas (worn velvet and cigarette smoke) and cafés (banana milk shakes and Peardrax) but the one scent I could never capture, could never collect and store, was that of hot sand. For hours I would sit on the beach pulling handfuls of it up to my nose and the moment I thought I grasped the essence of the scent it was gone, it had literally slipped through my fingers. My mother quizzically looked over her novel, ‘I am smelling the sand’ she tells me I said. I remember wondering why it smelled different from the hot concrete of the promenade or the flint of our cottage. Unimpressed she returned to her Jean Plaidy.

No matter where I am in the world, as I turn over on a beach or clamber over dunes (the former is more likely), as the grains are disturbed and the odour is released, I am transported back to that moment when the world was full of wonder and everything was a new encounter.

Still today I find it hard to describe the smell of hot sand, yet were I blindfolded I would recognise it instantly and that I find puzzling. Not to be confused with muddy, wet shoreline sand, the damp musty sand of sandbags or the dirt sand of tracks and courses, the smell of hot sand is arid and dry yet very much alive and animalic; with the warm nutty accords of a kitten’s tummy. Mixed in with the musky notes, are the tangy sea air notes one would expect, this is not interestingly enough ozone we smell at the seaside and inaccurately describe. Stratospheric ozone shields us from dangerous ultraviolet light but ozone is actually a noxious gas which smells very similar to bleach, and rather than being the blustering source of health celebrated since Victorian times, ozone burns lung tissue and should be avoided at all costs. Fortunately it does not exist frequently at ground level, where is appears as a fossil fuel derived pollutant. The smell we associate with ozone is the dimethyl sulphide gas emitted by marine algae and which is the slightly sulphurous scent which is at once healthy and enthralling and sometimes troubling, depending on its concentration. The hay like notes in hot sand are dried seaweed and it is this matter that gives sand its organic olfactory properties, the tangy fresh cut grass notes. Weaving throughout is the waft of old worn leather, not the leather of a belt or shoe but an old much loved armchair sat fading in the sun for many, many summers, flaking like the leaf wrapper of an old cigar, dusty to the touch.

For me the smell of hot seaside sand is the life-affirming scent of summer, full of optimism and the joy of being at one with the world.

The Scented Letter is published by the Perfume Society for its subscribers. Find out more about the Perfume Society here.

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