A few days into interviewing the Bond No. 9 fragrances in my Library, I happened to be in Union Square.

My dentist is down there, and afterward I found myself standing near a small piece of my own fragrance history.

Back in the day, Saks Fifth Avenue was across from the parking garage, with Tiffany next door. The entrance I used was on the corner, and when you walked through it you did not emerge into some vast democratic field of perfume counters.

You pretty much walked into Bond No. 9.

This was dangerous.

I would “just pop in,” as one does.

Someone would spritz something on me. If I liked it, I might hand over my Saks card with the financially sophisticated instruction:

“Don’t tell me how much. I don’t want to know.”

And if none of the Bonds struck a chord?

Well.

Jo Malone was straight ahead.

You walked through Bond, past a few other counters, and there it was.

Suddenly, looking at the shelves in my house decades later, one of the Great Mysteries of the Collection seems considerably less mysterious.

I have more Bond No. 9-branded fragrances than almost anything else.

And I have far more Jo Malone than Bond No. 9.

Apparently, part of the answer to How did this happen? is:

floor plan.

The Collector

I have been calling the person who acquired most of these fragrances the Previous Librarian.

But perhaps, at this stage of the story, she was still more Collector than Librarian.

The distinction is affectionate.

Little Collector had disposable income. Little Collector liked beautiful things. Little Collector was remarkably susceptible to a good fragrance counter.

Little Collector also understood comparative economics.

Bond No. 9 was expensive.

Jo Malone, on the other hand, came in smaller bottles.

And smaller Jo Malone bottles were, by comparison, soooooooo inexpensive.

This reasoning became even more compelling in Las Vegas, while shopping with a girlfriend contemplating buying “just one more pair” of Jimmy Choos.

Place three bottles of cologne next to several hundred dollars’ worth of leather straps masquerading as shoes and suddenly:

Look at me. I’m being frugal.

Pat, pat, pat on Little Collector’s head.

But I shouldn’t make fun of her too much.

She wasn’t indiscriminate.

The evidence is sitting on the shelf.

There were nine Bonds in the Reshelving group.

Only three were full-bottle purchases.

The others are atomizers whose individual acquisition stories I mostly don’t remember. Some may have been gifts with purchase. Some I might have wanted to “try on again at home.” What matters is that I didn’t make a deliberate bottle-sized commitment to them.

The three bottles are different.

Those were Decisions.

And when I interviewed them again, all three kept their stars.

What Did I Actually Buy?

This is one of the questions the Great Reshelving keeps asking.

Not:

Is this a good perfume?

But:

Why is this here?

Those turn out not to be the same question.

Sometimes I bought a fragrance because I loved the fragrance.

Sometimes I may have bought the experience around it.

Sometimes the counter mattered.

Sometimes the bottle mattered.

Sometimes a salesperson undoubtedly “helped me decide.”

Sometimes the price itself probably contributed to the feeling that I was buying something special.

And sometimes Previous Me simply knew something.

The clearest evidence of that is New Haarlem.

I have one nearly empty bottle with five or six uses left.

Behind it is another nearly full bottle.

Plus, there’s an atomizer.

Previous Me would apparently like to make herself perfectly clear on this point.

Recognition

Seb introduced me to New Haarlem.

Years earlier, I had learned an annoying truth about perfume: many of the “grown-up” fragrances that smelled wonderful on other women smelled completely wrong on me.

Charlie. Obsession. Opium. Chanels.

I wanted to love them.

They declined the invitation.

Eventually I found Jo Malone, and with Jo Malone I learned that I could make fragrance work by layering. I could combine one thing with another until I had composed something that felt right.

I became the conductor.

Then Seb put New Haarlem on me and said:

“Try this. I think you’re a gourmand lover.”

Oh.

New Haarlem may have been the first grown-up fragrance I loved without tinkering to make it become mine.

Someone else had already composed the whole thing.

For once, I didn’t need to conduct.

I could just be the audience.

All these years later, I put it on again and within minutes thought:

Oh, I forgot how much I like this.

That is what recognition feels like.

And perhaps Little Collector deserves rather more credit than I was giving her.

The One I Remember Buying

Then there is New Bond Street.

I remember that purchase.

The bottle is red with black leopard markings, and when it was released I was told that there were only a few available and I was very lucky to get one.

I remember hesitating.

That fact alone is astonishing.

This was, after all, the woman whose usual financial-control mechanism at the Bond counter was don’t tell me how much.

But I thought twice about New Bond Street.

I also remember rejecting the even-more-expensive rhinestone bottle.

And that matters.

I wasn’t buying it as a “collectible,” or because someone had convinced me the bottle itself was an “investment,” or because I wanted the flashier, “trophy” version. If that had been the point . . . rhinestones.

I bought the regular bottle because I liked what was inside it.

While re-testing, I looked up when New Bond Street was released.

September, 2018.

That stopped me.

If you had asked me before I checked, I would have put that purchase somewhere around 2005, when I was working in San Francisco.

Not a little wrong.

More than a decade wrong.

But memory had apparently not filed the experience by calendar year.

It had filed it under:

Saks. Union Square. Bond counter. That version of me.

Not the long-married, older, “working from home” version of me in 2018.

However, September is not only my anniversary month, but my birthday month.

So, perhaps, “Happy birthday to me!” Me?

And the actual fragrance memory?

Much hazier.

When I finally interviewed it properly, I found vanilla cake batter, dry cacao, ground coffee, and something I kept chasing through nutty and fleshy until I finally landed on pulpy.

Fresh chestnut.

Not roasted chestnut.

Herbert loved chestnuts. Around Thanksgiving we would buy them fresh, cut little Xs into the shells, roast them, and crack them open.

What I smelled in New Bond Street was the pale, dense, sweet flesh inside before the roasting.

And there it was in the official notes:

Chestnut.

So the fragrance I remembered less clearly than the purchase still had something to say.

Its star stayed.

The Woman in the Shoulder Pads

Memory played another trick with Success Is the Essence of New York.

The bottle is black and covered with neon dollar signs.

From memory, the fragrance ushered in a woman in a suit with enormous shoulder pads and black patent leather stilettos, carrying a briefcase and looking over her Ray-Bans.

She walks into the room.

She doesn’t need to announce herself.

She is $$$.

I put the fragrance on.

Nope.

Success is, instead, warm. Soft. Vanilla-ish. A little spicy. Comfortable.

It reminds me emotionally of Shalimar, which my Aunt Nina used to wear—not because the fragrances are necessarily alike, but because they occupy a similar place for me: warmth, vanilla, spice, familiarity.

Apparently the shoulder pads belonged largely to the bottle.

I don’t think I would buy Success today. My taste has moved toward fragrances that “poke” me: that have something distinctive, surprising, or slightly odd enough to make me stop and pay attention.

Success doesn’t do that.

It simply smells good.

But I own a full bottle. And it appears to be discontinued. Plus, I can imagine exactly the kind of evening when I might want that particular warmth.

So it moved to the Comfort shelf in the Cabinet.

Collector and Librarian

In going back through these bottles, The Great Reshelving is not a trial of Previous Me.

I am not trying to prove that she had terrible judgment.

Nor am I obligated to preserve every decision she made simply because she once made it.

The old black ratings recorded what I thought then.

The new ratings record what I think now.

I worked out what those symbols mean in the original Great Reshelving post:

♥ — I trust you.

★ — I respect you.

< — I understand you, but we don’t belong together.

Those definitions are not rankings from best to worst.

They describe relationships.

And the Bonds turned out to contain almost every kind.

One old star became a <.

One old star remained a star but is going to Leann.

A fragrance I had never ranked became a heart even though I have absolutely no intention of buying a full bottle.

Several perfectly pleasant fragrances turned out simply not to have jobs.

And all three full bottles kept their stars.

Maybe Little Collector knew more than I thought.

Pat, pat, pat.

Straight Ahead

Saks is gone now.

Standing in Union Square yesterday, I smiled remembering my old route.

“I’ll just take a look.”

Through that corner door, up three broad marble steps, and . . .

Bond No. 9. On both sides.

Straight ahead: Jo Malone.

That geography explains rather a lot about the shelves I am Reshelving now.

And eventually I will have to deal with the Jo Malones.

Not all the Jo Malones.

Heavens forfend.

There are 75 bottles representing 59 different fragrances.

There are bottles in that collection with old hearts and stars. There are even combinations with ratings, remnants of the years I spent conducting.

Those aren’t the ones that intrigue me most.

It’s the bottles with no marks at all.

The ones I may have been talked into at a counter.

The gifts with purchase.

The multiples.

The three I recently discovered still wrapped.

Those are waiting for an entirely different interview:

Apparently I own you. How do you do?

But not today.

Today, the Bonds have finished their interviews.

And Little Collector, Saks card in hand, can finally leave the counter.

At least until she gets to Jo Malone.

Field Notes

★ New Haarlem — Maurice Roucel, 2003

Official notes: Lavender, bergamot and green leaves; coffee and cedar; vanilla, tonka bean, patchouli and amber.

New Haarlem was my EDC for years. I have one nearly empty bottle with five or six uses left, another nearly full bottle, and an atomizer.

It opens with a bright little lift—not CITRUS!, but something citrus-adjacent—before settling into a swirl of light-brown smells: coffee, vanilla, tonka, amber and cedar. Sometimes the coffee reads almost like dark maple syrup: warm, browned, slightly sticky, but never confectionery.

And it lasts. Nearly nine hours after application, I could still smell it.

Previous Assessment: ★ / Current Assessment: ★

♥ The Scent of Peace for Him — 2013

Official notes: Pineapple, juniper berries and bergamot; currant buds; cedar and vetiver.

On first spray: juicy.

The pineapple isn’t sweet or syrupy. It is more like freshly cut pineapple that is still slightly green—the kind that will be tart in your mouth rather than a Dole ring sitting in syrup.

As it dries down, the pineapple changes texture rather than disappearing, becoming more like dried pineapple. Then an unfamiliar clean, aromatic quality emerges before the fragrance eventually settles into cedar and vetiver.

A nice trip.

What I still don’t know is where this scent lives.

I like the whole journey. I just don’t know when I would specifically reach for it.

And a full bottle costs enough that uncertainty answers the purchasing question for me.

Lovely fragrance. Excellent atomizer.

Absolutely no need to gross up.

Current Assessment: ♥

< Queens — Laurent Le Guernec, 2014

Official notes: Blackberry, cardamom and bergamot; tuberose, champaca and osmanthus; musk, sandalwood, benzoin and amber.

Right away this was floral, but not a floral I recognized.

Pleasantly weird.

As it dried down, the flowers became bigger and sweeter. Eventually the closest association I could find was naked ladies: big, fleshy pink garden flowers on long stalks with no leaves, with a slightly strange edge.

Underneath was something cool, clean and faintly clinical—not literally antiseptic, but almost hospital room. Later I caught something strangely like toasted rice.

The official notes explain why I struggled. Tuberose, champaca and osmanthus are a considerably less familiar floral cloud than jasmine or lily.

Interesting? Definitely.

Bad? Not at all.

Simply sweeter and more floral than I enjoy on myself.

I know who it is now.

And I know someone more likely to enjoy it.

Current Assessment: < — Leann

< New York Oud — 2011

Official notes: Red plum, saffron and orange zest; oud, rose, orris and patchouli; musk, honey and vetiver.

This did not begin with oud.

It began fruity, with an odd spicy element underneath. Only much later did the oud become recognizable, and even then it remained soft and powdery.

The marketing copy, meanwhile, was doing considerably more work than the fragrance did on me: Cleopatra, a lovemaking-enhancing bath additive, “Green Card” oud, prowling patchouli, designated-driver vetiver and a “lingering urban-forest accord.”

My experience was rather simpler:

fruit → odd spice/floral → some powdery oud → fade.

Interesting enough to smell once.

No role I need it to fill.

Previous Assessment: ★ / Current Assessment: <

★ Central Park South — 2013

Official notes: Grapefruit blossom and black currant blossom; jasmine and lily-of-the-valley; woods.

Very floral, but in an easy, springlike, friendly way.

I got lily-of-the-valley and something gardenia-adjacent, with a brightness that reminded me of pittosporum—that sweet, airy spring-flower smell that feels immediately cheerful rather than dense or dramatic.

Several hours and a trip to the gym later, it was still very much present, moving somewhat toward soap but retaining its pleasant floral character.

And this one had an obvious destination.

My opinion of the fragrance didn’t change.

The wrist did.

Previous Assessment: ★ / Current Assessment: ★ — Leann

< New York Nights — 2017

Official notes: Gardenia, carnation and jasmine; patchouli, flowers, sandalwood and sea notes; caramel and coffee.

Pleasant enough.

The first thing I noticed was vanilla, with something sweeter and creamier around it that turned out plausibly to be caramel. There were indistinct florals and wood underneath.

It had good longevity.

But as the day wore on, it became increasingly non-descript rather than developing into something more interesting.

There is nothing wrong with New York Nights.

It is pleasant, sweet, floral, woody and long-lasting.

I simply don’t see a character in it.

More importantly, I don’t see a role for it that isn’t already occupied by something I like better.

Current Assessment: <

< Soho — 2016

Official notes: Sweet orange, petitgrain and cassis; orange blossom, jasmine and orris; moss, cedar, vetiver and amber.

On first spray, Soho had an immediate soapy quality.

It calmed down fairly quickly, but never really became more specific.

There was definitely a floral presence—eventually I thought perhaps jasmine—but otherwise I had the unusual experience of simply not being able to say what it smelled like beyond:

vaguely jasmine-y and soapy.

And that is essentially where it stayed.

Soho is not unpleasant.

It is simply indistinct.

For an atomizer, that makes the decision easy. There is no particular character here that I want to revisit, and no role another fragrance does not already fill better.

Current Assessment: <

★ Success Is the Essence of New York — 2013

Official notes: Coriander, bergamot, mandarin and cardamom; rose de Mai, nutmeg, iris and tuberose; vanilla, patchouli and benzoin.

This goes on as a soft vanilla-ish fragrance with a little spice around it.

As it dries down, it becomes warmer. The vanilla, benzoin, patchouli and spice create something almost amber-like.

The overall impression is warm, easygoing and very comfortable.

Previous Assessment: ★ / Current Assessment: ★ — “Comfort” Portion of Cabinet

★ New Bond Street — 2018

Official notes: Pepper, bergamot and lily-of-the-valley; chestnut, cacao and coffee; vanilla, sandalwood, patchouli and leatherwood.

This one took a minute to announce itself, but once it did, it became much more interesting.

The predominant impression is vanilla cake batter: creamy, soft and friendly rather than sugary or frosting-like.

At the beginning there is a little bright, floral lift. Underneath are darker notes: dry cacao powder and ground coffee.

There is also an unusual nutty, fleshy, almost pulpy quality that eventually resolves into something remarkably like freshly cut chestnut rather than roasted chestnut.

The official notes make the composition snap into focus: chestnut, cacao and coffee over vanilla, sandalwood, patchouli and leatherwood.

The overall effect is warm, creamy and friendly, but with enough texture and contrast to keep it from becoming merely another vanilla. Good longevity, too – at the eight hour mark, still has a chestnut-y, vanilla-y, friendly scent.