I often joke-without-joking that, at 26, I’m not an adult yet and I don’t know when I will be. True, I’ve reached certain milestones I associate with adulthood – living away from home, having a stable job, making to-do lists with boring things on them like “submit tax forms” and “take out the recycling” – but, in many ways, I still think of myself as a child. For all the Adult Benchmarks I’ve crossed off my list, there are many more I have not – like owning a set of glassware, getting a driver’s license, and, until recently, having a signature scent.
That last one happened quite recently, in fact. You see, for my birthday, my boyfriend commissioned perfumer Stephen Dirkes of Euphorium Brooklyn to make me my own custom fragrance. (Cue swoony girlish screaming.)
My love was mysterious about it throughout the entire process. “I met with a guy named Stephen today about your birthday gift,” he told me a few weeks before I was to turn 26. “He says the timeline is tight, but he thinks we can make it work.”
The following week, he updated me: “Today I did a bunch of research and sent Stephen a lot of what I learned. Hopefully it’ll be useful.” I was mystified. What did he have up his sleeve?!
Finally, a few days before my birthday, my beau arrived in Toronto for a weekend visit. Not long after getting to my apartment and setting down his bags, he told me, “I wanna give you your present now, because I can’t wait any longer.”
At his behest, I put on a blindfold while he rooted through his suitcase for the present, so I wouldn’t see anything until he wanted me to. Then he had me hold my upturned wrists out in front of me, and I felt him spray them with a cold liquid. An unfamiliar scent hit my nostrils, floral and dark and complicated. And then my love took off my blindfold and handed me a bottle of Aimanté.
I practically started hyperventilating as he explained how he had turned an idea into a perfume. He knew someone who had commissioned Stephen Dirkes to make a custom scent, and, knowing about my fragrance proclivities, thought I might like one of my own. (Um, very yes.) So he set up a meeting with Stephen and started collecting information about my scent preferences however he could: searching through old tweets and blog posts, looking up my favorite perfumes to determine which notes they had in common, and pondering how to distill his love for me into a scent.
Scents have been a recurring motif in our relationship, as I’m sure they are in many. Shortly after our first date, I told him the smell of him was still flitting through my memory, and he texted me a link to the cologne he’d been wearing. Since then, he’s decided which perfume I should wear when we’re out together, left me shirts of his to inhale deeply in his absence, sent me flowers to excite my senses during depressed spells, and even kept the occasional pair of my panties to sniff when he misses me. Giving me a unique perfume seemed like a natural evolution of the olfactory flirtation we’d already been engaged in for quite some time.
“The juice” went through a few iterations; my partner brought some rough drafts on sampling cards for me to sniff. The final fragrance is aggressively feminine and sexy, yet quirky – like me. It’s a blend of blood orange, red geranium, balsam, amber, cocoa, patchouli, and vetiver, which reads to me like a peculiar mishmash of notes but which flows together undeniably well when you actually sniff it.
The name, Aimanté, is a French word meaning either “loving” or “magnetic,” depending on context. It’s a nod to how the two of us have often described our attraction as inevitable, ineffable, magnetic. On our second date, yearning to kiss him but not yet allowed, I told him, “I feel like a magnet,” and he said, “I do too.”
The scent itself intrigued me from the first, and has grown on me with every wear. When my darling debuted it on my wrists that day, it struck me as outsized: too loud for li’l old me, bolder and brasher and more beautiful than I have ever felt. But then I thought of something Helena Fitzgerald once wrote in the Dry Down: “Giving someone perfume as a gift is a chance to show them who they are to you,” she theorized, “and receiving perfume as a gift is the opportunity to wear that self as a costume, for brief periods of time to live as the person someone else understands you to be.”
With that in mind, the perfume felt more right to me. It’s like when someone who loves you takes a photo of you and captures a beauty you’ve never been able to see in yourself. I began to feel stirrings of the zaftig confidence evoked by the fragrance, which I know my partner sees in me but which I often can’t see in myself. What an unspeakably powerful gift to give someone.
Like most perfumes, Aimanté goes through an evolution as you wear it. The first few minutes are heady and floral, a burst of ridiculous femininity, like a wealthy woman posing for a portrait in her powder room, clutching a bouquet of geraniums. On me, it fades down gradually, hour by hour, into something sweeter and simpler. The sinful creaminess of the cocoa and vetiver sing at its core, so I can be a brassy broad by day and an elegant femme by night. The truth of me is somewhere between those two extremes – I’m neither totally bold nor totally docile – so I like that my new perfume oscillates between these two types of woman, too.
The idea of having a “signature scent” has long appealed to me, ever since I was rocking Kate by Kate Moss daily in the 10th grade and maybe even before that. But I rarely found a fragrance that resonated enough to make it my go-to. Certain faves have emerged over the years – Varvatos, Tobacco Vanille, Noel au Balcon, and Aoud Lime, to name just a few – but seldom has one endured as the scent I wanted to represent me in others’ minds and memories. None of them felt entirely like “me.” I suppose it took a partner who knows me inside and out to create a scent that really feels, wholly and harmoniously, like the essence of me.
I can’t think of another gift I’ve received that made me feel as seen, as understood, or as loved as this one. And I’m reminded of that deep, fierce love each time I lift my wrist to my nose.