Smelling My Way Through 2022
A feast for the senses in every season
Hello friends,
As you reflect on the things you did and the achievements you accomplished this past year, I invite you to think about those moments in time not just through more familiar senses like sound, sight, and touch, but also through our other sensory organs like taste and smell. How does that memory change? Do you remember things differently?
Scent can be a really powerful, emotional tool for recalling experiences, so I thought I would include a few of my own fond memories from 2022 through the things I smelled (perfume or otherwise!).
WINTER
I’ll start in February with Daniel Lie’s installation at the New Museum, Unnamed Entities. A living installation comprised of soil, flowers, grass, fungi, straw, and mud, I remember stepping into that ground floor gallery and breathing in that wet, organic smell of growing and rotting earth. Lie’s queer ecological practice is rooted in a defiance of binaries and collaborations with non-human entities and forces that decenter the human as artist and subject. For the installation’s duration (I caught it a second time later
as its funk of decay progressed), life and death collapsed together, sprouting, blooming, and consuming each other.
When I went to Streecha for the first time, I was having a bad day. The kind of bad day where all I wanted to do was walk aimlessly around the city in the freezing cold with my headphones in. I had heard about this restaurant in the basement of a Ukrainian church in the East Village and decided to stop for a bite to eat and defrost for a little bit. It was a Sunday, after the church service. The air was warm and yeasty, with vegetal bursts of dill and the occasional note of someone’s aunt or grandmother or mother’s amber perfume wafting luxuriously through the air. I had a bowl of borscht, a plate of vareniki, and a warm bread roll. It was heavenly.
The dead of winter in New York can be a muted, sterile place. Familiar city smells are masked by puddles and ice. Our noses get numbed into oblivion and the wind whips through our layers with such ferocity that any perfume you wear evaporates almost immediately. It was refreshing, then, to visit Olfactory Gallery Keller for the first time. The gallery is the only one of its kind dedicated to scent-based art in the city, and its show New York/New Fumes featured artists working across all 5 boroughs. The selection of scents (and the vessels made to house each fragrance) paralleled New York's diversity in culture and experiences, with some taking up the city as muse and historical influence while others sought to locate their own feelings and identities in the urban landscape. There were notes of asphalt, loneliness, honey, and metal.
SPRING
As the weather warm up, my friends and I ventured upstate to go dandelion picking for a local brewery that makes small batches of wine each year. By the end of the day, our hands were stained yellow and sticky with plant matter and sweat. Everyone took turns dumping out their bags to weigh the harvest, filling up bins with botanical gold. Among the fresh vegetation of the farm's orchard and the gentle reek of manure coming from their sheep pen, the blooming dandelions smelled so soft and sweet.
I came across this burned-out car while walking to a friend's birthday party in Sunset Park. The April air was crisp, hostile. People passing by ogled at the abandoned hulking frame of gnarled metal and broken glass. No one was around to tell us what happened, who the car belonged to, or why it had been left to die like that. It was simply a little piece of apocalyptic chaos taking up a parking spot on a residential street. If you dared get close enough, you could still smell smoke, tar, and melted plastic lingering inside. Afterwards, I spent weeks hunting for a perfume that could transport me back to that unsettling moment.
Henry Rose’s Flora Carnivora was the perfect perfume for that time of year when the days violently oscillated between gray and dreary and startlingly sunny. It’s a floral with a ferocity to it, luring you in with comforting notes of orangeflower, tuberose, and jasmine, until you find yourself in its feral aftermath of musk, cedar, and vetiver.
SUMMER
On an adventurous whim, I decided to pick up a spent oyster mushroom growing block from one of Smallhold’s community pick-ups and took a crack at trying to get some edible fungi to fruit. Did I succeed? No. Did the smell of damp mycelium stink up our apartment for a whole month? Yes. Will I try again? Of course.
If my summer travels could be distilled down into a single scent, it would probably be that jolt from a freshly-pulled shot of espresso. My boyfriend and I ended our summer with a 2 week trip, half in Berlin and half in Lisbon. Whether we needed to perk up in a sleepy afternoon or starting our day with plans and pastries, that nutty, roasted aroma chased with a sip of sparkling water was our delicious travel companion.
This was the season of salt and brine. When I told a friend about how many oysters, mussels, and clams I consumed over the summer, they jokingly said that I had entered my mollusk era. I loved nothing more than sharing a plate of oysters on a blistering hot day, pairing them with all kinds of vinegars and tomato juice concoctions. Some personal favorites: Strangeways in Brooklyn, Imprensa Cocktail and Oyster Bar in Lisbon, and YOT Bar and Kitchen in Fort Lauderdale.
FALL
I was in the throes of feral girl autumn when I encountered Marissa Zappas’s deliciously animalistic perfume, Flaming Creature. Inspired by Jack Smith’s 1962 experimental film of the same name, this smells like pure wildness, with notes of peppercorn, jasmine, and patchouli that perfectly capture Smith’s style of smoldering erotics. I first sampled it at Lucky Scent’s Scent Bar, then again when Zappas did an adorable pop-up at Susan Alexandra right before the holidays. It’s utterly ravenous.
I don’t have any pictures of these because I kept shoveling them into my mouth without thinking, but these gochujang caramel cookies were a feast for the senses. Created by Eric Kim for the New York Times cooking section, these smelled and tasted unlike any other cookie I’ve had before, perfectly balanced between sweet, savory, and spicy. When my roommate made her first batch of them, the smell that filled up our apartment as they baked in the oven was absolutely mouthwatering.
As the temperature dropped, I began gravitating towards sweeter, warmer scents to combat the looming desolate chill of yellowing leaves and shorter bouts of daylight. I was immediately drawn in by Ded Cool’s Taunt. It’s a grown-up vanilla deepened with bergamot, amber, and florals, less like the overpowering body sprays you’d buy from the mall as a teen and more like a romantic respite from the gloomy cold. When I was stressed out in the throes of finals, putting this on helped me feel put together again.