Choosing your Wedding Day Perfume

A couple weeks ago, I attended an event at Philly’s Perfumology, a unique fragrance house which featured the scents of Fragrance Du Bois, an enchanting luxury niche perfumer crafted in France. As I sniffed the gorgeous golden bottles, one scent in particular transported me back to October 30th of last year: my wedding day.

That’s the beautiful thing about scent — it is so closely linked to your memory that it can act as a teleportation device, defying space and time itself, as it delivers you to that special moment in the caverns of your mind. How often has a smell triggered a memory for you? A faint sniff of an old blanket reminds you of afternoons cuddled up at your grandparent’s house as a kid, or the familiar, fading scent of a passing stranger reminds you of someone…

My teleporter, Fragrance Du Bois’ Santal Complet, is a beautifully soft, delicately complex blend of violet, sandalwood and coconut. Its decadent, sensual notes of vanilla and amber melts on your skin like a creamy sun drenched afternoon haze while the freshness of violet dances with the daringly enticing mysteriousness of black pepper. The result is a delicious juxtaposition: a lively spark of crisp sunshine dissolving into a warm, spiced vanilla cloud. It’s absolutely dreamy.

Santal Complet, my wedding day perfume.

So, what’s the point of choosing a Wedding Day Perfume?

Once I started planning our wedding, my friend, Erin, a perfume enthusiast with an incredible scent-focused instagram feed, asked me if I had chosen my wedding day scent. I hadn’t, and honestly hadn’t even thought of it. She explained to me how your wedding day perfume should be special, unique. Introducing a new scent to match your day will uniquely bind that scent to your memory, carrying those memories with you, forever. So each time you depress the bottle or catch a faint sniff on a worn shirt, it will remind you of that very day when you got married. What a sweet idea, I thought.

If you’re not the romantic type or a perfume connoisseur, you may think this is bullshit — but the evidence proves the contrary. According to a recent Harvard article, (as well as plenty of other research and studies) scent is closely linked to memory based on its proximity to the hippocampus and amygdala, the brain’s regions for emotion and memory. After all, smell is incredibly important, you wouldn’t be able to taste your food without it. In recent years, there have been more studies linking smell to memory. A decline in a person's sense of smell over time can predict a loss of cognitive function and even foretell structural changes in regions of the brain affected by Alzheimer's disease and dementia. So, your ability to blindly identify signature scents like coffee, lemons or popcorn can actually infer your propensity to develop memory or cognitive related diseases. Crazy, right?

So, don’t forgot to stop and smell the roses when you see ‘em.

Anyway, enough of science and back to romance.

Erin gathered a collection of perfume samples based on the notes I like to find my wedding day perfume. She gave me a little bag of samples with a thoughtful note detailing the vibe of each scent and why she thought it was special for me. Each morning, I’d reach into the bag, read her words, and envelop myself in the mystical mist of the day. It was such a fun adventure to explore the scents and determine if the feeling was just right, just like finding my wedding dress all over again.

What’s interesting, is that I’ve never actually prepared for a memory. I was approaching a memory that didn’t yet exist, like opening the door to a little time capsule about to be implanted in my mind. Thinking about it this way also helped me to be more mindful about my wedding day: a reminder to be present, to take in the little passing moments and appreciate them; to notice the colors of the leaves, to feel the press of my husbands lips, feel the gentle air against my exposed back — instead of getting swept up in the whirlwind of the day.

When choosing my wedding day scent, I looked for something unique to capture the essence of my day. Deep in fall, I wanted my scent to emulate the feeling of fall: the brisk air, the warmth of the autumn colors, something that felt light and airy, just like the outdoors where we would marry. When choosing your wedding day perfume, I’d encourage you to do the same. Explore something new. Think of how you want to feel. And remind yourself to remember because nothing can prepare you for just how quickly those hours pass you by.

While I was at Perfumology’s event, I found a woman, Annaliese, who was there in search of her wedding day perfume. From across the room, I watched her spritz a bottle of Siberian Rose on her wrist and sniff it in delight. I saw her smile with excitement as its warmth enveloped her. In that moment, I thought back to my own wedding day, to the moment I spritzed on my perfume alone in the sunlight of the old mansion’s suite. I can still picture the particles swirling in the air above the dark wood of the mansion’s floor as I took a deep breath, connecting that magical bind. Now, each time I spray Satal Complet on my skin in the morning’s sunlight, I think back to that day. And as the warmth of my sweater sweeps across my skin and I catch the smell, I think back to the first step of my chiffon baby blue heels, crunching the crisp, golden afternoon leaves of October as I walked down the grass aisle during our ceremony. My mind drifts to slow dancing outside the stone mansion with my husband, the thought of holding his hand, John’s face when he saw me for the first time, and I smile, too.

What a beautiful, unexpected gift it was that Erin had given me: a lifetime of opportunities to so clearly gaze back on the most perfect day of my life. And now, luckily, I get to carry those breathless moments with me, forever reliving them through a simple spritz, though the rest of my days.