Base Notes Quotes

“Scent is the strongest link to our memories. What I do just makes a deeper connection. Brain chemistry or black magic—it’s unclear. People pay a lot of money for it, though. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only person who knows how to do what I do. Jonathan certainly didn’t teach me, except through his unwilling participation in my first experiments. Perhaps it was something he had dreamed of, in concept. In execution—as it were—the product was all mine. Except, of course, for the components that went into it. Then again, he was a secretive bastard, and I don’t exactly shout about my talents from the rooftops. There could be other perfumers offering the same services, but I have as little idea of them as I hope they do of me. The memory began to swim, growing indistinct as the brighter elements of brine evaporated. The leather and coffee would linger through the last of my Scotch. If I didn’t shower, I would go to bed with Jonathan’s ghost beside me and wake in sheets that smelled like he had stayed the night and slipped away before I woke. I finished my whisky and went to the windowless bathroom, turning the water on so hot the whole apartment filled with steam. When I came out my skin was pink and I only smelled like soap. Castille, unscented.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Good luck. For most of my generation, it would just go to student debt and cocktails. If anything came to me (an impossibility), I would dump it into a poorly managed career in edgy luxury items. You can’t make opera money on perfume that smells like cunts and gasoline. At any rate, I didn’t usually make an appearance beyond the gala. Or, I hadn’t until recently. But Joseph Eisner had promised me a fortune, and now he wouldn’t take my calls. He did, however, like his chamber music. It had been an acquired taste for me. In my distant undergraduate past, when circumstance sat me in front of an ensemble, I spent the first five minutes of each concert deciding which musician I would fuck if I had the chance, and the rest shifting minutely in my seat. I still couldn’t stand Chanel. And while I had learned to appreciate—indeed, enjoy—chamber ensembles, orchestras, and on occasion even the opera, I retained my former habit as a dirty amusement to add some private savor to the proceedings. Tonight, it was the violist, weaving and bobbing his way through Dvořák’s Terzetto in C Major like a sinuous dancer. I prefer the romantics—fewer hair-raising harmonies than modern fare, and certainly more engaging than funereal baroque. The intriguing arrangement of the terzetto kept me engaged, in that slightly detached and floating manner engendered by instrumental performance. Moreover, the woman to my left, one row ahead, was wearing Salome by Papillon. The simple fact of anyone wearing such a scent in public pleased me. So few people dared wear anything at all these days, and when they did, it was inevitably staid: an inoffensive classic or antiseptic citrus-and-powder. But this perfume was one I might have worn myself. Jasmine, yes, but more indolic than your average floral. People sometimes say it smells like dirty panties. As the trio wrapped up for intermission, I took a steadying breath of musk and straightened my lapels. The music was only a means to an end, after all.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“But I have a high opinion of myself, and it never fails to surprise me when others don’t feel the same.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Or I will start an Etsy shop selling “natural essences” to women who worry about chemicals in their perfume. The kind of women who wear mineral-based powder makeup and spend seventy-five dollars on eye cream.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“A perfume without base notes has no staying power. If she wanted the beauty, she would have to take the filth as well. And Jane . . . I believed that Jane could learn to love it.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Giovanni put his scissor hand to his face, so the blades stuck out from his forehead like a silver horn. A unicorn: virtuous, pure, utterly unsuited to survive the guile of hunters. I spent a lot of time in the library as a child. These images stick with you.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Only you smell like yourself. And if I put you at the heart of a perfume and gave it to someone who had never met you, it would be like reading a sentence in which the object noun is written in a language you do not speak. Almost legible, but not quite.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Most people have a catalog of scents in their heads: coffee, rainstorms, that awful cherry-scented mopping soap they always seem to use in hospitals and apartment buildings. All of these scents are attached to the memory of sensations: emotional, physical, existential. And everyone’s associations are different.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“I want it to be big. Bigger than Santal 33.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“After the smeared chewing gum and general stink of the rest of the city—its incessant, insistent noise—stepping into the tangled, tree-lined streets of this old and monied part of the island felt like a magic trick. Or like crossing the border into a fairyland full of cruel creatures you would never understand, amongst whom you did not belong.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Tiny boutiques purveying raw chocolate and pink sea salt. Coffee shops where they inexplicably sold high-end Scandinavian hand cream.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“At this point I pulled my phone away from my face and checked the time; you’re not supposed to be able to read clocks if you’re dreaming. Seven oh three. This was real life, and I was going to have to deal with it.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“this was promising evidence that my theory about implanting memories via scent and suggestion was viable—that with a story to tie the elements together, a perfume could create something stronger than mere association.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“had a strong scent memory and could conjure the atmosphere of that conference room as if producing it from a filing cabinet and spreading it across my kitchen table. Freon, dust, hot plastic, paper. Corporate office accord. The egg salad, sulfurous with a sharp note of sweet vinegar for the emerald studs of relish. The barest hint of stale tobacco. Whisky breath, which was peat, fermented sugars, rotten meat. The smallest trace of orris root and musky jasmine for the whisper of sex”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“It’s one of the few places in the city where a person can sample the scent of ungulate manure. Not the reek of human excrement and piss, or the moldy-dusty funk of pigeon shit, but the true grassy smell of a barnyard. Like a well-balanced pinot grigio, the air was green and vegetal, warm with the memory of hay.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“I do not dislike tobacco as a rule—it is a delicious ingredient in many perfumes I respect and enjoy, and many I have made myself. But in the form of cigarettes and cigars, I find it noisome and annoying. It deadens taste and smell, and its own sour stench lingers for hours or days in the hair and clothes of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter the smoke in quantity.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Scent helps us recall memories we’ve already created.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Trophy Kill was a riff on the classic fougère, the favorite accord of Victorian gentlemen. Fig and violet shifting to a base of oakmoss, musk, and mildewed leather. Dark, toothy, unexpected. Close your eyes and you could be lost at dusk in the kind of fairy-tale forest the Grimms never cleaned up. A fox hunt ending in blood. A strong stirrup cup, and shadows. A riding habit wrenched above the knee.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Think of it like a dry down: to experience a perfume fully, you have to let it work through every note.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“Scent is the strongest link to our memories. What I do just makes a deeper connection. Brain chemistry or black magic—it’s unclear. People pay a lot of money for it, though.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes

“My flaw, like Jonathan’s, was an abiding passion to produce perfume that made people think. Or that bypassed the brain altogether and went straight to the gut and groin.”
― Lara Elena Donnelly, Base Notes