Perfumes for New Beginnings

All photos by Mishka Hoosen unless otherwise noted.

For many people, the current season is one of new beginnings. In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s often the start of the academic year and a chance for the crisp air of autumn to shake us out of our summer languidness. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s spring: when everything in the air bristles with freshness and new life. We blink a little in the sun and shake ourselves awake. We start thinking of summer holidays and the wind-down of the year. It’s a time to think, “What’s next?” 

With this in mind, I’ve put together some perfumes I consider to be perfect for new beginnings. Whether you’re starting a fresh academic year or feeling revitalized along with the rest of nature, I hope these bring you joy:

Dzing! - L’Artisan Parfumeur

Image via Fragrantica.

This odd, crackling marvel of a perfume always puts me in mind of a ringmaster stepping out into the sawdust-floored ring in leather boots. Indeed, the original inspiration for Olivia Giacobetti (the genius perfumer behind it, along with some other contemporary masterpieces of perfumery) was the circus. There’s an aspect of showmanship and illusion to the perfume  — veering between the smell of cardboard and old pages to the smell of a carnival candy-apple on a summer night. It’s a shimmering mirage of vanillin, resin, leather, and burnt sugar. It’s capricious — a calliope tune on the breeze, winding through a crowd under twinkling lights. One minute it’s the smell of sun-warmed pages of an old book, and the next the smell of pressing your face to the warm neck of a horse. It’s a smell I identify with on a visceral level — somehow putting into olfactory poetry the idea of curling up with a strange book on an autumn afternoon, and being transported into a strange, carnival wonderland by it. There’s nothing like it in the world. 

Every Storm a Serenade - Imaginary Authors

Image via Fragrantica.

This one is especially wonderful for autumn. It’s a perfume for looking out to sea and for the beginnings of voyages. It’s ambergris, seawater, and pine. It’s brooding, clouded days filled with the echoes of gulls’ cries and trade winds. It’s the tattered hem of a wanderer on the beach before a storm. It’s crackling with restless energy, it has a tragic backstory, and the plucky heroine has just arrived to get the gothic melodrama started. 

L’Ombre dans L’Eau - Diptyque

This one, in turn, is everything I love about spring. It’s my current signature perfume, and it always makes me feel alive, canny, awake to everything around me. You know that chilly, alert feeling to the air on the first mornings of spring? How every bud and twig seems to tremble with reaching and anticipation? This is that feeling, bottled. It’s green, green buds pushing through bones and dark soil; it’s the relentless resurrection; it’s fey, and eerie, a shiver on still water, a whisper half-heard in the woods, saying hurry, hurry, it’s time. 

Dirty - LUSH

Image via Lush.

This is a smell for the days when it feels like everything is at your fingertips, a smell for ready wit, a cocky grin, and luck changing. It manages to be both fresh and sensual, the smell of being freshly-showered, well-rested, and at your cleverest. Spearmint, tarragon, and thyme give this bracing energy, and sandalwood and lavender lend it allure and charm. It’s the scent for flinging your arm around your friend’s shoulder, for wicked grins and the world at your feet. 

All of these, for me, exemplify the crackling, electric feeling these transitional times of year always have for me. They’re the static before a storm, they’re the butterflies in your stomach, the leaves turning, the wind changing, and the half-dreaming murmur, “by the pricking of my thumbs...” 

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Mishka Hoosen is a writer, creative director, and neophyte perfumer living and working in Cape Town, South Africa. His first novel, Call it a difficult night, was published by Deep South Books in 2015, and he is currently working on a book about perfume and the anthropocene thanks to a residency from IFAS. Mishka is The Attic on Eighth’s Perfume Columnist.