green mountain air

A couple of weeks ago, my main squeeze and I took a road trip through Vermont and it smelled great. The nosy highlight was definitely Plummer's Sugar House, a maple syrup operation we visited just outside of Grafton.  Two kind, bearded Vermonters showed us how the syrup makes its way down from the trees and let us stand there with them while the small outbuilding filled with the syrupiest, warmest steam. Everything icy outside was melting, but the warmth of that cement-floored room somehow made me more aware of the cold smells outside; the snow, the dirt, the gravel. I could have stood there all day. I asked the owner if he noticed the smell anymore and he said not at all, never, not even on his clothes when he leaves.

LemonUp next to "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" at the Vermont Country Store

The Vermont Country Store, ur-general store, also yielded loads of nosy delights, including LemonUp Shampoo and Conditioner (pictured above) which smelled so exactly like a sucked-on Lemon Drop candy that it was difficult to resist the urge to pour the product directly down my throat. Isn't the bottle fantastic? Why can't I get my fussy all-natural stuff in bottles like these (made from corn-plastic, please)?

Sugar, milk, milk, cream, & cream at Ben & Jerry's

We also managed to visit both a deliciously fragrant chocolate factory and Ben & Jerry's headquarters, where there wasn't much to smell, to be honest. I'd previously read that it's actually due in part to Ben Cohen's anosmia that Ben & Jerry's ice creams rely so much on texture provided by all those chunks and swirls, but I forgot to ask about this during the tour as I was too enchanted watching pints of Jimmy Fallon's Late Night Snack come off the line, get their lids, and do a little flip before disappearing out of sight. Also, the tour was loaded with puns, and I have a soft spot for puns (I hold myself back so hard around here!) so I was pretty focused on enjoying those and imagining which flavor we'd get to sample at the end of the tour (Milk & Cookies, totally scrumptious). It was warm enough to sit outside with our ice cream cones, and I was struck by how the sky looked just as it does on Ben & Jerry's packaging, perfect cartoon blue. The bright sun melted the last of the snow but not our ice cream cones, and spring smells bloomed green all around us.

waiting by the phone

Katie Puckrik's review of Kate Walsh's new fragrance, Boyfriend, prompted me to test-drive my own sample vial this weekend. Though I feel like the feminine-masculine distinction in fragrances is pretty arbitrary, I was interested in the idea that the perfume was designed to smell like a man's cologne on a woman's skin. With this in mind, putting it on my own skin felt kind of meta, a "smell lingering on skin" lingering on skin. I was also intrigued by the fact that Walsh was inspired to design the fragrance when she was badly missing an ex-boyfriend, the venture capitalist who ended up giving her not only the heartache, but also the business-advice that fueled the scent. I found this story, regardless of how much of it was designed to set an ad campaign spinning, compelling: to be missing someone so much that you go searching for ways to re-create his scent on your skin, in your bed--and, when the smells you find in the world don't measure up, you essentially start your own business to satisfy your longing.

In the comments on Puckrik's post, a conversation emerged around a blue cheese/"pissy pineapple"/gardenia note. I didn't get any of these notes until the third time I tried the fragrance, and then I got more pineapple than pineapple-pee, and I of course wondered how much my nose was influenced by wanting to smell this (Why does one want to smell pee-pineapple? This is a fine question, and one this website was started in part to answer for myself. Why do foodies feel the need to eat kumquat-glazed Cornish game hen? That's for them to sort out on their own blogs.). All weekend, wearing the scent mostly outdoors, I got big plummy blasts of vanilla-y amber, a little bit of cedar, and some other mixed warm woody bits, but no peenapple (how could I resist?). Now, wearing the scent for the third time, indoors, it's still warm, but it smells more like tinned pineapple and pencil shavings, though soon these heat up into woodier, richer swells of musk and amber and something glowy enough to get me shoving my wrists up against my nose again and again--big benzoin tears (so named for the way the benzoin resin weeps from trees--and here I'd always thought it was just romantic fragrance-speak!) and some sweet pouty fruit. My own boyfriend, who likes Boyfriend, smelled the pee-pineapple note earlier on, and in general is able to more readily detect musky, animalic notes in perfume than I am. When I think something smells a little furry, he gets the whole beast smell straight off. It makes me wonder what notes he smells in me that I'll never know, and what he utters out into the air that I fail to register.