Fragrant travels with my mother

For many years I’ve read features about first fragrant memories. They normally go something like this:

‘My mother used to come and tuck me in to bed and say goodnight before she went out for the evening for dinner and dancing. I’d hear the rustling of her skirt, the jingling of her jewellery, and as she snuggled in for a kiss goodnight I’d inhale the very essence of her, the glamour that she represented to me, a mix of violets and lipstick, face powder and the intoxicating notes of … Je Reviens by Worth/Guerlain’s Mitsouko/Patou’s Joy/Ricci’s L’Air du Temps/Chanel No5* …. (*delete as appropriate) and a lifelong love affair with fragrance began’.

Well, my childhood experience with fragrance was nothing like that. Not even remotely. And although I associate one particular perfume with my mother – in fact, I’d go so far as to call it her signature scent – I honestly don’t think that I ever actually smelled it on her.  It was, as anyone who say my Instagram reel today will already know, Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass. It was kept not on her dressing table (which I don’t think I ever saw her sit at) but on a shelf in a wardrobe, out of reach and very much outside daily (or pretty much any) use. My mother was always keeping things ‘for special days’, but no day ever seemed to be quite special enough. That’s the thing about days, you don’t really know until they’re over just how special they were and many, even the bad ones, can still be punctuated with special moments. Far better to decide from the outset that regardless of events the fact that you’re living it makes any day special enough. But I know that can often be easier said than done especially if worries (particularly money worries) seem to foreshadow everything. Sometimes we just need things to act as beacons of hope; for my mother Blue Grass was like the green light across the bay for Gatsby. One day, if she just reached far enough…..

I can’t criticise her really because I have inherited the same ‘one day’ tendency and have been battling for years to overcome it. I’ve been better at seizing the moment in terms of using stuff (terrible – though perfect - word), but in my case I tend more towards a self-punished with my weight (I’ll do that when I’ve lost some weight and deserve it type scenarios). But anyway, I digress.

Despite its lack of deployment, Blue Grass played a big part in my childhood. I knew how much my mother treasured it and the lofty way in which it was treated added a certain veil of specialness to it in my eyes - and that veil came to cover to all things beauty-related. She had worked for Arden for a short while so I think the products held extra cache for her because of that, but mainly she also adored the smell. On very rare occasions we were allowed a sniff, but more often I got to inhale the aroma of the accompanying body lotion that she also had squirelled away: it was housed in a truly elegant pale blue plastic bottle – I can still picture it and the font of its labelling – and the nozzle of the lid was one of those that tucked down into the cap itself. The lotion was also coloured pale blue, which may sound weird but in reality looked wonderfully elegant and elevated.

Caption: The old and the new: my mother’s bottle of Blue Grass next to the modern

As she got older, and I got into the field of luxury and lifestyle journalism and started to buy my own (somewhat lavish) fragrances and wore them daily, my mother still never wore her Blue Grass. But I decided she should go to the fragrance ball, and knowing she had always held Chanel No5 in the lofty heights of the unobtainable, I started to give her that for birthday and Christmas, delighting in making that dream repeatedly come true; I don’t know now why I didn’t go for Blue Grass but I have a vague recollection that she felt it was no longer quite what it was and had lost some its allure, she hadn’t liked the firm leaving family control (though I don’t recall and have not recently researched the ins and outs of this situation), and the packaging she had loved was long gone. Chanel has been very smart: largely sticking with the codes of the known, the valued, and the lusted after.  

But, knowing I was making a heritage reel about Blue Grass for my Instagram, I decided to try wearing the fragrance myself this week, just to see how it felt and although I have the old bottle of my mothers (which, miraculously, still smells very much as I remember it, though more aldehydic in essence that my new bottle) I used the modern atomiser.  It still largely seems much as I remember it and I did ask Arden if they knew or could tell me how the original formula has fared over the years. They tell me that it has likely gone through a few rounds of regulatory reviews since it was launched in 1936 and that any reformulation would have had to be compliant with worldwide regulations but would have been kept as close as possible to the original.

So how did it feel to wear my mother’s fragrance that she hardly ever wore? Well, a little odd in truth. It is so synonymous with her but also with the wardrobe she kept it in that every time I sprayed it my head rushed back to that bedroom, to that shelf, the memories as clear as day. And such a strong flashback to a situation so full of bridled hopes is not necessarily the best way to start the day.  But once over that, it’s a perfume that is so full of charm and charisma, one that’s quietly empowering but not overpowering that only one friend mentioned it to say ‘Gosh you smell lovely, Ed’. But mostly it was just me getting flashes of its sumptuous headiness – sandalwood, patchouli, jasmine, vetiver and more – with old school powdery elements throughout the day and feeling cheered by it.

So it turns out that I love it enough on my own terms now and more than enough to incorporate it into my roster of favourites. Now that she’s out in the open I’m not putting Blue Grass back in a cupboard. And when I spritz it, it will also act as a reminder that every day, in some way, some specialness will fall.

https://www.elizabetharden.co.uk/collections/blue-grass-fragrance