Wet concrete

This piece was originally published in The Perfume Society’s magazine The Scented Letter.

I remember much of my adolescent life as spent outside; the streets were fascinating, the freedom of walking them alone was new. The route from school became increasingly convoluted, and outings to the cinema or for a spot of shopping provided excuses to just be, and walk, in the city, by myself.

Looking at the city was important, but – of course – cities smell, too. During my urban Polish adolescence there wasn’t much in the way of hay, or rose gardens, or raspberry crumble. There was the foliage of the bushes that grew outside our tenement (I liked to crush the leaves with my fingers for their damp greenery), sharpened pencils, and second-hand cigarette smoke. I was already interested in perfume, and I stored away my reactions to my mother’s Dolce Vita (sunny but also somehow stand-offish), my crush’s CK Be (intriguing, non-obvious), my classmates’ Vanilla Fields (omnipresent, vile).

In the mid-nineties my city was changing a lot, and I don’t think any smell embodied those changes better than wet, freshly poured concrete. Just like Edinburgh has its golden stone, Katowice had its concrete – not only in its infamous Brutalist architecture from the fifties and sixties, but also in new builds, being cheap, plentiful and robust. I’d stop by construction sites, listening to the churn of the concrete mixer, interested in the geometry of bare pipes within the hollows of unready buildings, but also to inhale the scent. I loved something about it; perhaps its mineral, soft but disciplined quality, or its suggestion of the swimming pool, or the way it reminded me of a pebble picked up at the seaside. Or – now that I think about it – the feeling it carried of things being remade, or renewed.

There’s something intriguing about that particular group of substances which seem like they wouldn’t have a smell, but do; the cool, slightly salty, spacious odours of shells, damp stone, the desert rose crystal my aunt had on her shelf. I’m certain they have something common on a chemical level, and while I don’t know for sure what it is, I’m aware it’s a difficult note to replicate in perfumery. I was briefly thrilled to learn about Comme Des Garcons’ Concrete, but (excellent bottle apart) it was nothing like the real thing. The name of Starck’s Peau de Pierre was promising, but it didn’t deliver either. It seems like I can’t replicate that scent on purpose: to get a rare whiff of that strangely refreshing note I have to find myself in the right place, at the right time – circumstances have to create it for me, and I’m all the more thrilled when they do.

I treasure my sense of smell; it allows me to experience the world in a way that never seems to be too much. I get tired of sounds quickly, my vision is overwhelmed by hours in front of screens – but smells are, for some reason, almost always welcome. Even the underlying strain of rubbish and weed of summertime London tells me something about it. I believe that in a life oversaturated with sights and sounds, smells allow us to read the world differently, can tell us stories we wouldn’t have picked up on otherwise. I’ve let those stories draw me onwards, into writing my MA thesis about the smell of spices in literature, into giving a keynote lecture at the 2017 annual conference of The British Society of Perfumers (about scents in literature, again), and co-organising a related event at the British Library in 2018. Following my nose and researching what it’s telling me has been so rewarding, and it’s led me to navigate all sorts of spaces more adventurously.

Much has been written about the ways places smell. The unfamiliar scent of the air hits you the moment you leave the plane, the island you fell in love with always welcomes you with wafts of frangipani. We feel that those place-smells show us an essence of the place, some truth about it. The truth of my adolescence in almost-post-industrial, post-communist Poland was transformation. And when I catch that whiff of wet concrete today, I’m there again – young, alert, hopeful. Much has been written about the ways places smell. The unfamiliar scent of the air hits you the moment you leave the plane, the island you fell in love with always welcomes you with wafts of frangipani. We feel that those place-smells show us an essence of the place, some truth about it. The truth of my adolescence in almost-post-industrial, post-communist Poland was transformation. And when I catch that whiff of wet concrete today, I’m there again – young, alert, hopeful.