Like so many Chanel perfumes, Cuir de Russie comes wrapped in a carefully edited mythology: all Russian lovers and riding boots, and don’t mention the war. My fifties-vintage extrait is warm horse, warm skin, warm leather, crushed flowers and cigar smoke, while this well-showered 80s rework by Polge walks briskly past the stables with a bouquet of irises and roses in expensively-gloved hands. In my scented autobiography, however, Cuir de Russie smells mostly of surgery and steel.

Hospitals stink, and I still get the grey-green smells of anaesthetic fogging my bad dreams.

1970: my first surgeries hold my earliest scent memories, of plates of warm sliced fruit, hot sun on over-washed cotton blankets, and the pink strapping and bandages of hoop traction.

1990: a second attempt to rebuild my hip socket smelled of Body Shop grapefruit soap, lemon-edged disinfectant, boiled potatoes, and stale cigarettes–this was long enough ago that I got wheeled out on my bed to smoke and play cards with the night nurses.

Surgeries before and after have smelled of vase water, blood, sweaty hair from plastic-lined pillows, baby lotion, plaster of paris, the rot of gangrene, mango, oil paint. (Please, never give me chrysanthemums.)

2005. My third hip replacement smelled of burning hot traffic jams, panic, Marks & Spencer sandwiches, fresh paint, a back of the mouth stink-taste of morphine, furious honesty, kiwi fruit, and Cuir de Russie. I’d bought this bottle to see me through the long wait, and the longer recovery, as something to make my bashed-up body feel special. And, yes, this elegant sharp-toothed iris goes remarkably well with under-washed bed-bound skin. It helped smooth over the most tedious expanses of time –dozing between ward rounds, days between physio, weeks of slow healing– and learn to stand tall again after. (Well, tall for me.)

I should hate it now as I still hate pink grapefruit soap and overripe bananas, but it smells beautiful enough to have entirely shrugged off pain and self-pity.

Is there a perfume that has survived bad associations for you?

Originally posted 1 July 2019