The Scents of Melancholia

(image taken from my bedroom window at dusk, sometime earlier this year :)


Taking in the essence of a fragrance can enhance one's mood, evoke emotion, or provide some kind of fragrant association. In my mind, there are several scents in the fragrant world that evoke that true sense of melancholia. Whether it's a rainy day, you're down in the dumps, or your heart is quite simply broken, it's at times therapeutic to just wallow in it and immerse yourself in a scent that embodies your depressed state. For myself, I like to partake in one of the following:



#1. Guerlain Apres l'Ondee

image taken from www.polyvore.com

According to www.fragrantica.com, notes in this fragrance include orange blossom, violet, and aniseed. The scent is meant to evoke those initial moments after a rainfall, where foliage is sweet and wet with fragrance. The traditional Guerlainade is ever-present in this one, artfully enveloped by a very retro violet.

I'm not sure if it's the vintage quality of this fragrance, but wearing this one makes me feel as if I've hopped aboard a time machine and transported myself to the turn of the 20th century. I see myself in an older, damp English home, looking wistfully out its carefully paned window onto a dew-infused garden. In my hand a lover's letter of regret. It's the scent of heartbreak, and when it's time to wallow, this is the perfect fragrance for it.


#2. Christian Dior Dune



image taken from www.dior.com





Puzzlingly described as an 'oceanic' scent, this fragrance embodies the dryness of the desert and imparts such a cold aura that I practically shiver when I wear it. With notes of mandarin, peony and vanilla, (and something else that somehow manages to smell how grains of sand feel), Dune is Cruella Deville-like in its disposition. Despite it's assertion as a desert fragrance, it's positively icy to me. When one isn't ready to face the world in their heartache and is desperate to feign a courageous facade, Dune is positively the way to go.




#3. 'That' scent.








(image taken from www.dezeen.com)




When one is ready to torture oneself in grief, it's time to take in whatever scent reminds you of him or her most. That mystery scent will transport you back in time, to the beginning of love, when everything seemed possible and you never envisioned yourself without them. That mystery scent will be the constant reminder of what once was. You might never reclaim it as anything else.