I’m sitting here sniffing hedgehog-paw shaped jelly sweets* we bought in Hong Kong, and they’ve got the peachiest peach flavouring/scent you could imagine. They smell as intensely pink and squishy as the super-kawaii candies themselves. This triggers all the “peach! wow so peach!” exclamations in your head as you sniff or eat, but, it’s nothing like peaches at all. It’s the peach of shampoo and scratch-and-sniff stickers, not the fruit, except perhaps canned with extra syrup. It’s the emoji representation and not the Cezanne.

Mitsouko’s peach does not, and never has, smelled pink. It took me ages to remap and recognise the peach notes of Mitsouko as peach, given that “peach” has drifted so far from the luscious golden flesh, and I was convinced that my skin just flattened peach notes.

Nope.

I just had just mislabeled the real smell in my head.

Has Mitsouko shifted and changed over the years? Of course. It’s not just my shifting perception and mental mapping. Do I miss the inkiness of 80s oakmoss? Absolutely, because I adore oakmoss. But Mitsouko is still bloody lovely, and the brand new versions seem way better than the shrill hollowed-out one that was kicking about ten years ago or so. And it really doesn’t smell like hedgehog toes. Or maybe it does. Who the hell knows what they smell like?

* We ate a ridiculous amount of gummy sweets on this trip–why are there no grapefruit Haribo in the UK, huh? or sharp green grape flavoured anything? or pear and pomegranate flavoured Moomins? Gelatin free, no less. But the Shiawase Happy Nikukyu Gummy win the cuteness prize.

originally posted 26 April 2019