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Dirt: Pure and simple

Dirt: Pure and simple

The scent of royalty

30 Jan

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Katy Kelleher on Harry's memoir and Diana's perfume.

If you spend any time on fragrance message boards, you’ll notice a pattern. Users post frequently about the strangest scents they’ve ever heard of: the NASA-shilled smell of space, for example, or the notoriously fecal Hydrax by Zoologist, which lists real “African stone” among its ingredients. Users recommend offbeat perfumes often to each other, advising posters on how to smell like a florist’s compost bin or a concrete cityscape after a storm. Yet when it comes time to post collections, the truth of the fraghead is revealed. We all buy the easy ones, the popular ones, the ones that smell like food or flowers. I have one such scent: Wild Bluebell by Jo Malone.

It’s a pretty, light, green floral. Like most Jo Malone perfumes, it is a straightforward scent that doesn’t change much; it starts pretty, ends pretty. It’s my three-year-old’s favorite of my perfumes—she’s currently in her princess phase and she wants everything to be “pretty as an angel” (a phrase I believe she picked up from a religious woman at daycare). It’s also supposedly Meghan Markle’s signature scent. According to a rumor popularized on Reddit, Markle picked this perfume as part of her master plan to snag a prince. If you believe this misogynist tale, Markle smartly pinned Harry as the kind of guy who would enjoy being reminded of his mother on a first date and thus purchased a scent to tickle his subconscious. It’s also possible that both women just happened to like bluebells. They do smell divine.

Leaving aside any unsourced gossip about the freshly minted memoirist, there’s something weird to me about the pairing of princesses and perfumes. It’s a topic that we know precious little about, since scent reporting is largely driven by speculation and self-reporting. According to sources close to Kate, the future queen is, like her sister-in-law, a Jo Malone customer. The Duchess of Cambridge likes their Orange Blossom perfume so much that all of Westminster Abbey smelled of it during her big fat royal wedding (she commissioned candles featuring the scent to be made just for the event). Some reports state that she chose White Gardenia Petals by Illuminum for the occasion, whether in place of Orange Blossom or in addition to, I do not know.