(illustration via here)

This morning, as I walked out of the subway, an old familiar scent passed me by: Sunflowers By Elizabeth Arden.  Sunflowers was my first perfume.  I must have gotten it when I was around 14 years old.  It smelled fresh and happy; wearing it made me feel older and more sophisticated than I was.

A decade or so later, I found my second scent: Stella McCartney’s Stella.  This is not to say that I wore Sunflowers for a whole decade, rather I wasn’t really one to wear perfume in my late teens and early twenties.  But I received a free roll-on bottle of Stella at a fashion PR event my friend was working as one of her first jobs in New York and I adopted the scent as my own.  Its smell reminds me of my early days in New York, living in the East Village and going to parties that lasted til sunrise.  Now, yet another decade later, I have a new fragrance: APOTHIA’s IF.  I love this scent so much and can’t imagine ever moving on from it.  But chances are, in another ten years, the smell of IF will remind me of of myself now I can’t yet classify.