TALES FROM THE DRESSING TABLE: FRAGRANCE

Is there anything more evocative than fragrance? In a heartbeat, just a trace of a certain perfume can transport you back in time. For me, Madame Rochas, Diorissimo and Miss Dior by Christian Dior, Caleche by Hermes and Je Reviens by Worth all instantly remind me of my mother and my childhood in the Sixties. I'd have to add the heady scent of Elnett hairspray to that list, too, as it was such a fixture on my mother's dressing table and she was forever spraying great clouds of the stuff around her head. I'll never forget the time she was in a rush and reached for the hairspray, only to realise, too late, that she was spraying her hair with a can of furniture polish. Her fabulous beehive, that had taken her ages to backcomb and perfect, slowly disintegrated into a soggy mess before our eyes. I'm pretty sure I got the giggles at that stage and was ceremoniously marched out of my parents' bedroom.

But back to the serious fragrances - it isn't only the wonderful aromas of the perfumes my mother wore that have stayed with me all these years, it's also the memory of the feel and the shape of the fragrance bottles. I so adored admiring and holding those beautiful bottles as a child. They were like artefacts; so pleasingly tactile and luxurious, and so different to my assorted bottles of 4711 toilet water and other, totally insipid toiletries, that I used to get for Christmas. 

Miss Dior advertisement from 1971, illustrated by Christian Dior's great friend, Renee Gruau.
Miss Dior was created in 1941 by Paul Vacher and Jean Carles
Photo credit

I was particularly fond of the Madame Rochas clear ribbed-glass bottle, with its gleaming gold stopper. It fitted snuggly into its silk-lined box and smelt so sophisticated and divine. Whenever my mother went out for the evening I would wriggle away from the babysitter and sneak up to my parents' room. I'd quietly pull out my mother's satin-covered stool and sit, as carefully as I could, at her dressing table and survey her collection of fragrances. Her whole room smelt of perfume and the dressing table, which stood centre stage in the window, was decorated with the fabulous scent bottles that my father brought back for her on his numerous business trips abroad. Once I was confident that the babysitter wouldn't follow me upstairs, I'd tilt the dressing table mirror to my hight before applying the perfume to my wrists and behind my ears, just like my mother used to do. I'm sure she must have known that I'd been sampling all her perfumes when she came home and popped her head around my bedroom door to check I was fast asleep - just the smell from the concoction of fragrances I was wearing must have given me away. She very kindly never said a thing; perhaps she felt it was a rite of passage for me to experience her perfumes first hand. I remember clearly being over the moon when I was given a bottle of Diorissimo on my 13th birthday. Finally I had my own very grown-up perfume to place proudly on my tiny dressing table and, from that day on, I'm pretty sure I stopped tampering with my mother's perfume bottles.

When she passed away a few years ago, I took care of clearing out all her wardrobes and her treasured dressing table. It was such a difficult and emotional task, but there was a reassuring lingering trail of Madame Rochas that stayed with me during those dark days; just as if my mother was there, right beside me...
  

Madame Rochas by Rochas fragrance advertisement from the 1960's. The perfume was created in 1960
by Guy Robert, the nose also responsible for Caleche by Hermes (1961)
Photo credit