Most winter lists are fireplace lists: amber, vanilla, oud, a pinch of cinnamon. Nothing wrong with a fire, but none of it smells like the first cold morning, when you open the door and the air hits you. Seven fragrances, seven kinds of cold: clean air with a warm hand in it, snow, a mountain pass, a whole pine tree, a church with the heating off, tea with the frost still on your coat, and the ash in the grate the morning after. Bring a scarf; these won’t do that job for you.
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The anchor. Ellena’s winter is what the house calls a “warm water”: heliotrope, iris and a drop of honey over clear, cold air. Quiet enough to miss, and still here more than twenty years on.
Snow itself, about as literally as perfume gets: a cold, watery accord and mint, with a soft warmth underneath, like the bird inside the feathers.
Peppermint first, then cypress and pine needles over cedar. The thinnest air here, from a house whose four seasons are set in the Himalayas. It smells the way breathing in hurts a little.
The house sums it up in one sentence: “It’s pine. It smells like pine.” Correct, and better than it sounds — the whole tree, sap to bark to the needles on the forest floor.
A church with the heating off: frankincense and myrrh folded into starched white linen. Avignon is the better-known cold incense; Cardinal is the one that feels colder to me.
Mint sharp against hot, smoky black tea, birch smoke on the coat. For something this rich it wears cool. Now Smell This called it “almost cologne-like”.
The ending, and the best of the seven: an iris the morning after the fire has gone out. Earthy, rooty, cold ash mixed into the powder. Same nose as Russian Tea, a year later and a good deal colder.