Fifteen years. It sounds significant. Undina’s Looking Glass has been quietly alive for a decade and a half. Over that time, I’ve shared thoughts on hundreds of perfumes, collected stories, and occasionally lost myself in pages and pages of notes that never quite became posts.
Anniversaries have a way of making time feel tangible, which led me to a small thought experiment that had been on my mind lately.
Many of my long-time readers come from the same generation as I do. So, chances are, my reference to a 40-year-old movie will not be entirely unfamiliar.
I was thinking about the Back to the Future trilogy. While the films are largely about trying to repair the past after it has been unintentionally altered by time travel, the second movie introduces a particularly tempting side effect: knowledge brought from the future, precise enough to be useful and dangerous enough to change everything. That’s where my thought experiment comes in. What if I could do something similar, but on a much smaller and harmless scale – and only perfume-related, so no early tsunami warnings or other world-saving abilities involved?
The car from the movie (I took that photo at Universal Studios park, CA in 2000)
I could have followed the movie logic and traveled 30 years back, since I’ve loved perfumes for as long as I can remember. But that would have placed me well before I went down the proverbial rabbit hole, and I’m not sure that my almost-signature-scent self would have been receptive to any perfume-related advice, let alone able to act on it.
Fifteen years, on the other hand, seems like the perfect destination. I was enthusiastic, curious, and actively absorbing “perfume wisdom.” Advice given then wouldn’t have needed translation or years of patience before I could act on it.
The first thing I would tell myself is simple: some preferences never change, and tuberose will never become “my” note. This would have saved me countless hours of testing perfumes I would inevitably dislike.
Next, I’d give some guidance on how to approach samples: There will be more perfumes I dislike than like. I shouldn’t spend money trying to test a brand’s complete range unless I can do it for free. And I must not hoard samples of perfumes I dislike just to maintain a full set. I will never change from “dislike” to “love,” and they will quietly evaporate – or worse, I’ll retest them later and waste time rediscovering that I didn’t like them.
I’d also advise myself on “special occasion” perfumes. Many of the perfumes I’ll love will be naturally bold, loud statement pieces – that can’t be changed, and shouldn’t be. But there are only so many occasions to wear them, so if I really want to enjoy them, I should designate more occasions as “special.” Weekends or work-from-home days should be perfect for this.
Finally, as an “almanac moment,” I would tell myself to buy Tom Ford Violet Blond as soon as it appeared at any discount, not to wait for the best price, and Jo Malone Lotus Blossom & Water Lily, a limited edition that would never be reissued. And also… I would have probably whispered to myself to invest in liquid gold, vanilla, and sell those positions in 2018 once the price hit $442,000 per ton… No, I shouldn’t! Even in my small, harmless experiment, changing too much (and for profit!) feels like sneezing on a butterfly wing, and who knows what ripple that might set off. What if my meddling had gotten Duchaufour fired from L’Artisan Parfumeur, and suddenly Nuit de Tubereuse never existed? Oh, wait… maybe it wouldn’t have been that bad… But no. Best not.
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Since my blogoversary fell on Saturday, I decided to combine it with my regular Saturday Question. Above was “My Answer.” Now it’s your turn.
If you had the same magical channel to your past self, what year would you choose, and what advice would you give?
Just remember: that one-way membrane can pass only perfume-related information.
Undina's Looking Glass 