Just wanted to say Happy Mother’s Day! A favorite topic on this day is what perfume your Mom wore and how that influenced your fragrance preferences and memories. My Mom didn’t wear fragrance when I was growing up so I really had no influence from her in that area, but my grandmother (my Mom’s mother) loved fragrance. I can remember sitting next to her in the car on our way out to dinner on special occasions, and she’d always smell so sophisticated to me wth her perfume. She often wore aldehydic florals but I was too young to know which ones. She mostly just wore perfume to go out and my Mom almost never wore any, so I grew up thinking of perfume as more of a special occasion indulgence, though friends in high school changed that perception later. Someone gave me a bottle of L’Air du Temps when I was in grade school and I loved to sniff it but felt it seemed to old for me at the time.
My Mom did wear perfume when she was in college, mostly Chanel No 5, but I don’t associate that with her since she didn’t wear it much after my brother and I came along. My Mom is more into gardening and cooking than fragrance, but she enjoys sniffing things I create — Velvet Rose and Champagne de Bois are her favorites to wear so far. I’m lucky to have grown up with great parents and to still have them with us. Happy Mother’s Day!
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My mother Jacqueline wore 2 different perfumes. Arpege by Lanvin and Chanel #5. From the time I was a little girl she would let put little dabs on my pulse points and behind my ears. She was very petite despite having 5 boys and 1 girl. She wore very high heels, made her own clothes, baked her own bread and always smelled good. I don’t know how she did it. She was my inspiration for perfume. I still love those 2 scents.
Hi Kathie, what great memories, thanks for sharing that! Arpege and Chanel 5 are wonderful classics and must have been a fun introduction to perfume. Bread baking is a scent memory I associate with my Mom too. 🙂 Hope you had a great mother’s day weekend, thanks for stopping by the blog!
SOTD – Arpege old and new!
Hope you’ve enjoyed Mother’s day with your mother. I spent the afternoon planting the 6 roses that I had ordered online last month, along with several dozens annuals and a few perennials. Funny but the garden still looks like it needs more colors…
My mother was not a perfume person. She did have, from as far back as I could remember, a bottle of No 5 with the ground glass stopper, which I’m guessing is from the 50s or early 60s that she had received as a gift. She gave it to me several years back (with still about 1/4 of the perfume remaining) when she discovered that I was collecting perfume bottles. Hers, along with the Shalimar bottle were the one that inspired me to start collecting, about 15 years ago. I’m still on the lookout for a Shalimar bottle w/o the plastic fitting at the top that I can afford! Anyway, I’ve never known mom to buy perfume for herself although she seemed to covet L’Air du Temps when buying gifts for others. L’Air may be my earliest memory of a perfume even though I did not smell it until I became an adult.
Oops, pressed the submit button a bit too soon!
To wrap it up, my memories of her scent were more for the scent of her makeup than perfume. She did receive fragrance gifts from time to time but rarely ever used them. Certainly that bottle of Chanel and L’Air du Temps were the early seeds to my love for perfumes as an adult.
Thankfully my mother is still alive and well, though living far enough away that I only see her for a few weeks out of the year. Now a days, she comes to me to ask for fragrances that she might wear!
hi Ann! Wow, sounds like your garden is getting a spring sprucing up! Sounds nice! Hope you have lots of roses to enjoy later this summer.
Sounds like your Mom was similar to mine in saving perfume more for special occasions. That’s neat you have the vintage Chanel 5 bottle with its associated memories, and the vintage parfum is really nice! Good luck on the Shalimar bottle hunt. EBay prices for vintage bottles seem to have climbed a lot the last few years.
Bet your Mom would have fun sniffing your sample collection!