Heya Posse! What an incredible name for a fragrance. Memory Of Kindness. Christopher Brosius does some wonderful work and when I saw this name on Surrender To Chance it alone drew me in and called on me to purchase. Kindness, such a simple theory so rarely utilised.
Memory of Kindness by CB I Hate Perfume 2006
Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Tomato leaf, soil tincture, green notes
You want to talk about memories? Behind and next to our pool in the family home Mum had vegetable plots. They weren’t very large but parsley, spinach, mint, rhubarb, beetroot, potatoes, beans and many others all got grown over the years. It was these little plots that would teach me the art of gardening and to love it as a pastime/hobby. Surprisingly I was quite good at it. Every year Mum would buy a punnet of Tom Thumb variety tomatoes, these are the little ones that you can pick, wash in the pool and pop in your mouth. A simple joy that has never escaped me and I still get the same thrill even now with the packets of near tasteless ones we get at the supermarket.
Memory of Kindness is an homage to the smell of tomato plants, but it has a zesty, maybe citrus or pineapple zing behind the leaves. Maybe it’s orange tree leaves added? Plus the ozonic super heated air of summer and the wet coolness of the pool nearby. Memory of Kindness is a very happy memory of my childhood, gardening with my Mum. Even a slight whiff of the humus rich soil under straw and grass clippings is here. You know the feeling when you sight a slug in the garden, this is what my mind says they smell like.
As the fragrance moves on to dry down it becomes cooler and more remote, the sun has left the garden, late autumn has arrived. I can smell drifts of leaves and the sharp metallic taste of snow coming. Interesting fragtrwant ride, that something could change so thoroughly from beginning to end. BRAVO Christopher Brosius, what a scent.
Further reading: Now Smell This and Kitchn
CB I Hate perfume has water perfume from $60/30ml
Surrender To Chance has samples from $3/ml
You might like to read some more about CB I Hate Perfume on Perfume Posse
Did you have tomatoes in your garden as a kid?
Portia xx
Portia also writes for Australian Perfume Junkies
Such a beautiful post, dear!! So glad this scent invoked happy memories for you. No tomatoes for us, but we did grow/eat our own rhubarb when I was a kid in Ohio. Went to college in Georgia and when I asked a supermarket produce manager one March for rhubarb, he looked at me like I had three heads, then after thinking for a minute, he smiled like he knew what I meant. He went into the back and returned, proudly handing me a batch of rutabagas, ha!! I need to try this fragrance ASAP. Thanks!
Yes and I remember as a kid having to pick the green worms off the leaves and disposing of them….underfoot. Ugh. Tomatoes were good though!
Hey JenniferS,
Ours had white powder for the bugs, probably totally toxic.
Portia xx
Like most other Midwesterners, I grew up with a garden. My mother was a fabulous gardener and we had all sorts of veg and flowers. Interestingly, I did not garden with my mother, which I find just odd, considering that I am an inveterate gardener and always have been.
Christopher Brosious does something no other perfumer (he’ll probably beat me for calling him that) does (or does nearly as well) – he can evoke so many, many memories. March introduced me to MoK and I remember, at first sniff, feeling my heart just lift!
xoxoxoA
Hey Musette,
100%, somehow he gets into our heads and noses as if he’s lived our lives. Amazing.
Or maybe he picks his most prominent memories, which happen to collide?
Portia xx
Well, I’d like to suggest you place other forms of payment besides Paypall. In today’s society people don’t like to have companies tracking them. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to place an order, but I guess I’ll have to use Paypall, so be it!
In Ohio, it’s a requirement to have a vegetable garden. My dad always grew tomatoes, green beans, lettuce and broccoli for his. I didn’t inherit his green thumb but it was my job to pick the vegetables.
Hey eldarwen22,
You got the best part of gardening. Picking for the table was always so bloody exciting. Even if it was Mum asking me to go get parsley. I felt like a real gardener.
Portia xx
What a beautiful post — your descriptions and memories made me happy this morning. We did have tomato plants, but I didn’t appreciate them when I was young — I hated raw tomatoes back then. My vegetable garden memories have more to do with picking green beans for dinner, and stealing blueberries from under the netting Dad had put up — he could never figure out how the birds were still getting at his berries!
Glad you liked the post HeidiC,
Ha Ha ha Your poor dad. I bet he was really scratching his head.
Portia xx
I love this perfume and drained a decant years ago. I’m in the rural Midwest US and vegetable gardens were practically required when I was growing up. We had an acre sized garden and I spent many sweaty, happy hours working there. We always had loads of tomatoes because my parents grew up during the Depression and thrift was deeply ingrained in both of them, so we canned tomatoes and tomato sauce and tomato juice (alongside green beans, corn, pickles of all sorts etc etc.) Lovely memories.
I love that story Rosarita313,
One Acre of garden sounds like a LOT of work. Canned homemade sounds really yum though.
Portia xx