do you remember tweed perfume?
if, by chance, you happen to have an old bottle of tweed perfume stashed under the bathroom sink, dig it out. even if it’s used, you can hawk that bottle of old scent on ebay. the same goes for a half-gone bottle of discontinued crepe de chine fragrance. and we’re not talking chump change here. some of these old fragrances fetch prices in the hundreds of dollars. currently, someone is asking $377.99 for the one ounce remaining in an old two-ounce bottle of tweed perfume. perhaps rancid? the vendor warrants nothing other than what the bottle looks like. for $152.69, you can be the proud owner of 100 ml of estee lauder’s beautiful body lotion. the vendor here asks you to note that it’s the “older formulation”, which i’m guessing is highly coveted. you won’t do so well flogging a flacon of the old dime-store standby evening in paris online. there’s so much inventory available that it seems a generation of underwhelmed women tucked this into their bottom drawer.
why are people interested in old perfumes? i guess because it’s the next best thing to travel.
of all the senses, the sense of smell is the most evocative. if you want to conjure the past, the single best way to do it is through our sense of smell. with the exception of smell, our brains receive sensory information via the thalamus, the body’s information relay station. an odour, however, isn’t relayed through the thalamus. it travels straight to the areas of the brain that play a role in memory, creativity and emotion. the volatile organic compounds that define any smell cross the blood-brain barrier swiftly and intact. thus, our brains react strongly to the presence of an odour. studies have found that test results improve when students are exposed to a fragrance that was present while they were studying. according to the study, the memory of the material being studied is heightened by the presence of the identical smell. scientists call this olfactory bonding. other studies using eegs and mris have detected emotional and behavioural differences provoked by the presence of fragrance. in fact, a study by the olfactory research fund in new york found a 63-per-cent reduction in patient stress when vanilla scent was pumped into the air around the mri.