Today’s post is courtesy of HemlockSillage’s comment/question on last week’s post: What are scents that seem cold and winter-y to you (HS noted Frederic Malle L’Eau d’Hiver and CdG Zagorsk)?
I am going to go a bit broader and look at what are winter smells here as well.
Winter, as I have said up the wazoo, is not my season. I love a proper snowstorm. I still reference the one early in a January decades ago a year or so before I left the US, when we got two feet of the most gorgeous powdery fluff and for a full day New York City stopped. Plus visiting NYC in 2010 and getting diverted and stranded overnight in Minnesota when JFK was closed due to a huge storm (we got there the next day and the holiday was magical – my son, who was around 9 at the time, got to experience proper sledding and loads of good NYC hot chocolate). I remember fondly winter trips to northern Maine in my teens where again you’re talking two feet or more of beautiful powder – to the extent snowshoes were required.
But. You don’t get that here.
For reasons that are inexplicable, when I did move out of London in 2010, I ended up in an area that boasts 40% more rain than London and has a strange microclimate.
Winter tends to be cold and damp and grey. The upside is my garden harbours a huge jasmine, a very happy dwarf apple tree and sometimes the seagulls drop seeds that come up as surprises (huge vari-coloured poppies, foxgloves one year, different coloured aquilegia).
Recently, I passed a stand of dead trees which had a very winter smell … but it’s really hard to describe. Cold, like the way I think of cold smelling. Not ice ‘smell’, not damp. Just very cold, grey-blue and empty.
Mostly in the winter my village smells of evergreens and pine, leaf mould and wood smoke – and every once in a while you’ll wake to the smell of muck spreading on fields. The wood smoke can vary from fresh piny to brandy and cognac. You get some winter bloomers in January: crepe myrtle and daphne bushes, with their strange, sweet, heady scents. I have a daphne on the north facing side of the garden. I rooted it – very proud of that – from a twiglet I stole from a neighbour’s neglected bush. The last time I went to the garden centre I brought along a small branch with flowers and got it identified. So, I know, truly, that it is a daphne. This morning, I cut off a branch to give the rest of the bush (around 3 feet high) more access to light and air.
There are winter smells of pastries from the bakeries in the next town over: cinnamon, vanilla, dark spices. Cold fish from outside the fishmonger. Cold root veg in boxes inside the farm shop and then sausage baps (big floury rolls) from the outdoor food shed at the local farm shop.
I tend to wear warming scents in the winter as I get cold easily and need heating up. Perfume H Smoke, a hot incense, gets a lot of love in cold, damp weather; Guerlain Shalimar does too, with its non-sweet vanilla and weird bit of lemon floor was (more apparent in the EdT vs the parfum); Serge Lutens Arabie – that huge spice and dried fruit thing — is on big rotation; now, Victoria Beckham 21:50 Reverie, a peculiar, not very sweet, heady, slightly strange vanilla, has been included. If I need big white floral, I’ll pull out the tuberoses, in particular Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle with that unsettling menthol opening.
But perfumes that smell of proper winter to me? That’s a different story. I would say Lutens Fille en Aiguilles, with its pine and stewed apple thing – cold and damp; of incenses, Etro Messe de Minuit is one of the coldest I can recall, with that inside-a-cathedral stone aspect; Perfumer H’s Ink, which is heavy on the vetiver and makes me shiver a bit; and some things with aldehydes. I would put Chanel No 5 into a winter category.
Are you a winter person? Does where you live get ‘proper’ winter weather and do you embrace it? Smells and perfumes that say winter to you?
Pics: Pexels and mine
Not a winter person at all. I hate being cold and I hate driving in the winter. I used to try and snowshoe, and do fun things but we have not had much snow at all (except for last winter, when we got an entire winter’s worth of snow in 24 hours. I knew I left the truck in the driveway but I had to shovel down to find it.).
Winter smells-your winter is very different than our. Almost nothing grows here in the winter. Around the end of March you can find a few snowdrops. Winter smells? Snow and ice have particular smells, and I do love the quiet that comes with a deep snow fall. I love the scent and sound of ice cracking in the rivers in the spring-it smells like cold rot. Hear me out-what we smell is last years vegetation, caught in the ice. When you smell, and hear, the ice cracking you know spring is on its way. I work for a fuel company so I associate that with winter, too.
When I lived in New Brunswick the Saint John River was used as an ice road. It’s dangerous cause it doesn’t freeze all the way across. Seems like every year in the spring someone would lose a truck in the ice, or some ice shacks stayed on the ice too long and went through. After the spring floods FB would be flooded with pictures of lost decks and things that had floated down the river-if this is yours come get it.
In my mind there’s only eight more weeks of truly awful driving to get through 🙂
No. Not a winter person. I understand completely why many animals hibernate. Right now (Midwest) we are in a Polar Vortex. The temperature is 6F/-14C and they say it feels like -11F/-24C and we have 25mph wind gusts. Hibernate it is.
The only thing “perfumery” is that one of my daughter’s birthday gifts from me was a travel size bottle of St. Clair Scents Casablanca. Beautiful and perfect for daydreaming of warm, balmy, places with the scent of white flowers carried on the breeze!