I don't think we choose all the smells we love.
We like to think we do. We stand in front of a collection of perfumes and decide which ones suit us, which ones we want to wear and which ones we could happily leave on the shelf. We read about ingredients, discover new brands and develop our own preferences. Eventually, we become quite certain about what we like. I know the kinds of fragrances I'm drawn towards, and I've spent enough time around perfume to think I understand why. But long before we know what bergamot or vetiver smells like, we've already started learning what feels familiar.
Think about the smells that surrounded you when you were growing up. The soap in the bathroom. The shampoo someone in your family always used. The cream that sat on a dressing table. A particular aftershave that seemed to belong to one person and nobody else. Perhaps there was a perfume bottle that appeared every morning before someone left the house. We probably didn't think of these things as fragrance at the time. They were simply part of the smell of home.
That's what fascinates me about scent: our tastes begin forming before we have the language to describe them. We learn, by repetition, which smells belong in a bathroom, which suggest somebody getting ready to go out, and which feel comforting or reassuring. These early lessons don't necessarily make us love a particular perfume later. They give us a reference point, a quiet idea of what feels pleasing, appropriate or familiar. Long before we can explain our preferences, we are already collecting examples.
Years later, a perfume might appeal to us because it seems to belong to a world we already understand. It needn't smell exactly like the soap or aftershave from childhood, and it may share none of their ingredients. Perhaps its softness feels familiar, or its clean, soapy quality seems reassuring. We inherit expressions, habits, recipes and ways of doing things from the people around us. We pick up phrases without realising it and discover that we laugh in the same way as someone else in the family. Our preferences, too, can carry echoes of what we knew first.
Nobody sits us down and says, "This is the sort of perfume you should like." We absorb these associations through repetition. A particular soap becomes the smell of being clean. An aftershave becomes the smell of someone we love. A floral perfume becomes associated with getting ready to go out. By the time we're old enough to choose perfume for ourselves, some of those associations have been quietly working in the background for years.
This makes the idea of fragrance as self-expression rather more complicated. We often talk about choosing perfume as though it's an entirely individual act. We find something we love and decide that it says something about us. Sometimes it does. But the person making that decision has already been shaped by a lifetime of smells. How much of the way we smell is actually ours?
There's no easy answer. We can deliberately choose something completely different from the fragrances we grew up around. We can reject the smells that remind us of childhood and discover oud, incense, iris, leather or woods that weren't part of our early lives. We can reinvent what fragrance means to us. Yet even that choice is interesting. We're defining ourselves partly in relation to what came before, whether we embrace those early associations or decide to move away from them.
Familiarity doesn't always mean affection, either. A smell that reminds one person of home might remind another of a place they'd rather leave behind. Perhaps a parent wore a fragrance you found overwhelming, or a particular soap brings back a time when you wanted to be older, more independent and entirely unlike the people around you. Those associations can be just as influential as the comforting ones. We might say we dislike powdery perfumes or a particular kind of floral, when what we're responding to is something more personal than the fragrance itself.
Our preferences also change. The smells we associate with comfort at eighteen may feel different at forty. We move house, meet new people, travel, fall in love and encounter fragrances that weren't part of our early lives. A smell that once seemed unfamiliar can become a favourite through repeated experience; something we loved as children may eventually lose its appeal. Inheritance isn't destiny. It gives us a starting point, not a set of rules.
And family isn't the only influence. A school corridor, a local shop, a swimming pool or a holiday hotel can become part of our personal map of the world. We might not think of these as fragrance experiences, but they teach us what certain places are supposed to smell like. Later, a trace of chlorine, polished wood, incense or sun-warmed skin can stir a response before we've consciously identified it. Our sense of what smells good is shaped by the environments in which we learn to live, as well as by the people we love.
An old perfume bottle can also make us wonder where our preferences began. Perhaps its fragrance seems dated or unfamiliar; perhaps, to our surprise, we find something in it that we like. That response can tell us as much about our own taste as it does about the perfume. We may recognise a style we grew up around, or discover that an association we thought we'd left behind still has a hold on us. The interesting question isn't who owned the bottle, but what it reveals about the way we have learned to smell.
A bottle can, of course, be passed from one generation to another, but that is the most obvious kind of inheritance. More often, what gets passed on is less tangible: an idea of what clean smells like, a preference for florals, a dislike of something heavy, or a fondness for the powdery scents that once filled a family bathroom. Nobody needs to hand us these things deliberately. We absorb them through everyday exposure, and only later begin to recognise them as preferences of our own.
These early experiences don't dictate what we should wear, but they can influence what we notice and what we dismiss. That's why I've become wary of the idea that there's a single correct way to choose perfume. We're told to identify our fragrance family, understand our notes and find something that reflects our personality. All useful advice, but taste isn't formed in a single afternoon at a perfume counter. It develops over years, through exposure, habit, curiosity and the occasional surprise that makes us reconsider what we thought we liked.
We may be shaping somebody else's taste in the same way. The soap we always buy might teach a child to associate a particular kind of freshness with being clean. A perfume we wear often could make them curious about florals, woods or citrus years before they know those words. We won't be setting out to influence them. We'll simply be going about our lives, unaware that our everyday choices are providing their first reference points.
We spend a great deal of time choosing fragrances that represent who we are. I find it just as interesting to consider the preferences that formed before we were old enough to choose for ourselves. Some of our tastes will stay with us; others will change as we encounter new places, people and perfumes. The point isn't that our childhood decides our fragrance future. It's that none of us starts with a completely blank slate.
Perhaps the inheritance isn't a particular smell at all, but the beginnings of a taste: what we find comforting, what surprises us, and what we're drawn to before we can explain why. We spend years making those preferences our own. Only occasionally do we look back and realise that some of them began long before our first bottle of perfume.
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