Writing About Perfume as the World Burns

One summer evening in Kharkiv, I was writing a perfume review when the air raid sirens began. The sound was now part of the city’s fabric, as ordinary and as terrible as the smell of bread from the bakery on the corner. I paused, listened for the thud that might follow, and then turned back to my draft. A question pressed against me: What am I doing, writing about perfume as the world burns?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times over the past years. Perfume can seem like a frivolity, a luxury for calmer days. But the more I’ve lived through, the more convinced I am that it is not just a product. Perfume is a cultural layer, a record of our rituals, desires, migrations, and exchanges. It carries the memory of places and the touch of history on the skin. Every bottle is both a work of art and a fragment of anthropology.

Scent has always been part of our human story. Think of the rosewater used in Persian kitchens, the attars that traveled along the Silk Road, the citrus colognes worn by generations in Spain. Each carries not only a smell but also a history: of trade and craftsmanship, of gardens cultivated, of migrations and exchanges that shaped the world we live in today.

I think of the work of Aanchal Malhotra, the Indian author and oral historian who collects memories of Partition through the scents, tastes, and objects that people carried with them when they fled. Her books reveal how something as fleeting as a whiff of spice can hold the weight of loss, longing, and identity. Perfume is part of that same continuum, a sensory archive that can survive even when everything else is left behind.

In Ukraine, I’ve seen this cultural layer at its most poignant. Even in wartime, perfume shops remain open, their shelves lined with beauty. Some sell decants — small vials filled from the original bottles — making luxury accessible to those who can’t gamble on a full size. You decide and take home 2ml or 5ml. In those tiny bottles is not just a fragrance but a gesture: that beauty still matters, that life is worth embellishing.

Perfume is also a keeper of memory. I can open a vial and be transported to my grandmother’s garden, to a trip I took years ago, to a city I might never visit again in this lifetime. A perfume I wore in Odesa still carries the scent of the city’s acacias and the marine tang of its spring air. Like a letter or a photograph, a fragrance holds the past in suspension.

And perfume is art as a blend of chemistry, imagination, and cultural reference. A great fragrance is as carefully composed as a painting or a symphony. It speaks its own language, one that can be read on the skin and remembered in the mind.

So I keep writing. Not because perfume is a distraction from the world’s crises, but because it is part of the story of how we endure them. In the midst of destruction, people still reach for beauty — not despite the darkness, but through it.

Why do you enjoy scents?

Photograph by Bois de Jasmin, in The Rooster House scents evoke places and people and anchor memories. And there is a special story about Chanel No 19 that I will soon share with you.