In 2001, it was practically mandatory for midwestern teenagers angling for popularity to douse themselves in Clinique Happy or one of Abercrombie & Fitch’s perfumes. As a high school freshman, I tried both options and hated them equally. They reeked like puberty; I wanted to smell like someone more all-grown-up. Specifically, I wanted to smell like my mom’s best friend Judy, who seemed like she must have leapt from childhood into full maturity without a hint of an awkward stage. She wore Thé Vert, a unisex green tea scent from L’Occitane. Judy favored preppy looks, with starchy collared shirts, straight dark denim, whistle-clean sneakers. Thé Vert was just right for her, unfussy and crisp. I asked for the perfume for Christmas that year. I adored how clean it made me feel to wear it, like taking a cold shower on a hot day.

L’Occitane launched Thé Vert in 1999, so Judy was one of its early adopters. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was part of a wave of tea-inspired aromas jump-started by Bulgari’s Eau Parfumée in 1992. CK One, Calvin Klein’s blockbuster eau de toilette launched in ‘94, features a green tea top note. And Elizabeth Arden released a similar fragrance the same year as L’Occitane, aimed at the drug-store crowd. Francis Kurkdjian, who later went on to found his own beloved, eponymous boutique perfumery, created Arden’s fragrance. He knew what he was doing. Green tea was a signature scent for the ‘90s, the aromatic equivalent of a thin ribbed cardigan. The herbaceous bouquet is an androgynous olfactory antidote to more traditional florals or musks. It’s not stiletto-sexy, and nothing about it is sumptuous. There’s an astringency which may repel anyone looking for an enveloping, warm perfume, but that wispy, slightly bitter quality is what makes it so punchy.

Judy died before I finished high school—cancer, a million years too young—and so the perfume I’d found through her a few years earlier became totemic, an aromatic reminder of my mother’s lost love, and too painful to wear. A decade or so later, I searched for Thé Vert, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. The original formulation had been discontinued, it appeared, without fanfare. L’Occitane finally introduced a new version last spring (with more prominent citrus notes, according to the enthusiastic commenters on perfume forums) but it is also hard to find in the United States. The fragrance only comes in rollerball form. I ordered it but am still waiting for it to arrive, caught somewhere in the clogged-up supply chain.

If I want to explore other options, though, nowadays there are plenty. Like so many other Y2K darlings, green tea is back in vogue. Both Maison Margiela and Le Labo released matcha scents this year. Maison Margiela’s offering, part of its Replica line, is explicitly designed to evoke nostalgia. Called “Matcha Meditation,” it is meant to remind people who wear it of a quiet afternoon drinking tea. It sounds perfectly lovely, but I suspect no matter how finely wrought its concoction, a manufactured stab at past feeling will fall short of sniffing the actual source.
I’ll wait until my little rollerball appears to get a whiff of Judy and the person I used to be again.

The greatest reflection of a decade’s aesthetic is the type of perfume it produces. That’s certainly true of the 80s, with nuclear floral icons like Poison by Dior and Giorgio by Giorgio Beverly Hills representing the unrelenting excess of the time. Major sillage was the name of the game, with scent volume matching ratios of both the hair and shoulder-pad variety.

My theory is that these fragrances single-handedly scared us into minimalist submission by the time the 90s arrived. Along with grunge music and slacker style, 90s fragrances rejected the decadence and greed of the previous decade, welcoming instead inoffensive watery and unisex scents. Suddenly, everyone smelled like a nubile mermaid in a Neutrogena commercial, drenching themselves in aquatic accords from L’Eau D’Issey and CK One.

If you accept that each fragrant trend has an equal and opposite reaction, you can begin to predict what is to come. My own tween olfactory vocabulary was guided by the celebrity perfume machine of the early aughts, combined with my own unique desire to smell like a line of Pixy Stix dust.

I would argue the most accurate depiction of this sacred and profane time would be Jessica Simpson’s notorious “Dessert Treats” line of edible beauty products. TV viewers across the globe were first introduced to the products when we watched Jessica Simpson get sick from testing them on her reality show Newlyweds. Like many brands in the 2000s, Jessica’s was built on selling a hyper-sexualized version of herself to market the products (a marked departure from her earlier virginal branding as a young artist). The advertisements feature Jessica’s then-husband Nick Lachey tempting fate by licking the products off his wife’s body.

This would all be fine in theory, but the main demographic for “Dessert Treats” was your average tween—cut to me spraying the fragrance offering right in my mouth after receiving it as a gift. Smelling high-calorie during peak 2000s diet culture was truly a mood.

The frivolous and flirty Y2K perfumes gave way, after a financial crisis and recession, to the dawn of 2010s sober and humble skin scents and unisex woodies, i.e.: trying hard to not try hard. Examples include many Frank Voelkl creations, like Santal 33 and Glossier You. For my maximalist soul, this hasn’t been my decade, but as I’ve hinted, bold things come back to those who wait. The smelly ebb-and-flow is constant.

While we navigate the baggage of a post-2020 world, I’m seeing fragrances become indulgent all over again. Billie Eilish just dropped an Amber Vanilla bomb that also smells like the inside of a doll’s head. A new generation on TikTok is discovering the spun sugar insanity that is Baccarat Rouge 540 by Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and multiple designers, plus one notable celebrity (I’m looking at you, Ariana Grande) are putting out extreme versions of beloved gourmand classics like Killian’s Love Don’t Be Shy and YSL’s Black Opium.

We are entering a new age of yearning, aggressively seeking ooey-gooey comfort in spray form, and, oh boy, do we want it to be perceived. If the past is prologue, the circle of scent will begin again, candy-coating a new decade.

I am 30 years old, and I have never once purchased a real fragrance in my life. The only scents I have are ones that have been given to me, and even then, I’m talking about half-used bottles from far more glamorous women. I long for a real “scent” that I can make my own, but I am far too self-conscious to commit to anything. While I’d like to think I have a decent grasp on how to fool everyone into thinking I’m a woman who has it all together, I still have some major blindspots. Mostly, I know so little about fragrance that I can’t trust my own nose and so I’m left with a residual teenage fear—what if I smell bad?

Most of my strongest scent memories are from my formative years as a teen. To this day, I can’t smell Chanel Coco Mademoiselle without feeling a pang of sadness—my best friend who died when we were teenagers received it as a Christmas gift from her extremely fashionable mother. Over a decade after her death, while so much of what I remember about her fades away, the citrusy smell triggers memories that overwhelm me emotionally.

But the scent that shaped my adolescence in the most intense way will always be Curious, the first Britney Spears fragrance from Elizabeth Arden. I was 13 years old when it was released in 2004, and it was the first time a perfume resonated with me, partly because I was a Spears fan and also because the scent was impossible to ignore. Knowing others my age were able to wear it without smelling like an old lady meant that perfume was somehow accessible.

I was not the type of young woman who innately understood style or what was cool, it felt like out of nowhere my peers were moving on from Calgon Take Me Away Hawaiian Ginger, and onto department store fragrances, like Davidoff Cool Water. I didn’t get the memo, but luckily for me, I had two older sisters, one of whom purchased Curious for herself. It was the most adult thing I could ever imagine happening.

Even though I wasn’t allowed to wear her perfume to school, I found a way to douse myself in the sweet scent right before running out of the house onto the bus. At the time, this was the most daring thing I’d ever been capable of. The thrill of all this made me feel somehow like I was growing into my own person, one who knew what they wanted to smell like and was willing to risk it all. I was able to pretend to the girls who had graduated to wearing real bras that I too was well on my way to becoming a woman.

It felt out of nowhere we moved on from Curious, or rather it became normal and common and therefore no longer exciting. There was that brief moment where Curious felt like my key to unlocking what it meant to be a woman. If only it was still that easy.

The Professor wore Eau Duelle by Diptyque. “It’s the only perfume that doesn’t give me a headache,” she told me when I told her how nice it smelled so that I could ask what it was. I went out and bought it immediately. I wonder how many other people have done this because of the Professor, probably hundreds. Eau Duelle suits her perfectly: COLD vanilla, but not ice cream and definitely nothing like a cupcake. It’s vanilla in its pure medicinal form, cut with juniper berries. A sip of gin in winter, sweet in a mean way, with a cauterizing burn. The Professor was born in the north and likes to swim in ice-cold water. Her fondness for the cold is part of her personal legend. Once I was trying to meet up with her and she said the only time she was available was during her daily swim in the 60 degree ocean. I balked at the discomfort and wasn’t invited again.

She had taken an interest in me when I was younger and just becoming a mother. I was eager to be molded, to have a model. I wore Eau Duelle whenever I went to teach, thinking it would make me more like the Professor. Being in a position of authority didn’t come easily to me and I thought an olfactory costume might help. If my students smelled my fear, it would be overlaid by that wintery sweetness.

I had wanted to succeed at teaching but there was no path to success for me. It was too late to go back in time and do what the Professor had done; the world in which she’d made herself no longer existed, even though we were born only a decade apart. And then somehow I was suddenly old. I had the kids and the Professor and I were the same age, the age all mothers are. But while she had all the accoutrements of adulthood, the homes and jobs and awards in addition to her career, I still couldn’t figure it out.

One winter I wrote and asked to see her, desperate for advice and reassurance. I was old but still young enough to think that she had the power to help me. We sat on her couch and drank milky coffee, warm in an old building with clanking radiators. She was gorgeous, as always, and magnetic, and she vouchsafed opinions that had the immediate ring of truth. She told me without telling me that there was nothing she could do for me. She confessed that she hadn’t read my last book; I didn’t mention that I had thanked her in the acknowledgements. I would have to figure things out on my own.

I stopped teaching and stopped wearing someone else’s perfume. I wear Tom Ford Neroli Portofino now most of the time. It smells like sunscreen. Like a day at the beach when the water is the perfect temperature for swimming.