The strange potency of cheap perfume

Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find ‘the juice’ somewhat lacking. It might just be scented scaffolding, but fortunately the story underneath is captivating.

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Dune, CK One and the rest do not trigger madeleine-like waves of memory for Stripe; neither is this a paean to the olfactory art. The perfumes crop up casually rather than crucially: her dairy farmer father’s ancient bottle of Brut; her hairdresser mother’s Rive Gauche; a friend’s cloying Angel, which ‘fills every corner of the room like tear gas’. Under each chapter heading is a freestyle, hallucinatory evocation of era and scent, reading like discarded advertising material. (Giorgio Beverly Hills is ‘Porsche and Ferrari on Rodeo Drive… Alexis Carrington. A shag-pile carpet. No knickers, fur coat’.) Stripe lists each constituent, so Clinique’s Happy, another of her mother’s favourites, features ‘mandarin, clementine, green bergamot…’

While some pairings are on the nose, others seem almost random. Elizabeth Arden’s rosy Red Door evokes a grandmother, and Hugo by Hugo Boss a sweet boyfriend. Trésor eradicates the fug of body odour in charity shop finds, but that chapter’s most striking scene is of a cow being helped to expel a dead calf. For Stripe, it’s the pungent and unpleasant that has most impact: the stink of London in summer (‘armpits on the Tube, unbrushed teeth, overflowing bins’); the way Kiehl’s Original Musk (‘bergamot nectar, neroli and lily’) can’t dispel the stench of ‘brown sewage water’ released in a flood; the ‘citrus cleaner masking the familiar base note of human-soaked fabric’ in a care home.