My first memory of men’s fragrance was Cerruti 1881. Fresh and Sweet.
The smell of Anais Anais will always remind me of Christmas, as it was one of my first fragrances that I was given at this time & absolutely loved!
My Mum and Grandma are both smokers and both use Channel no.5 perfume. I associate the combined smell of cigarette smoke and channel 5 with my childhood. Hugs from my mother or grandmother before an evening out. Or staying at grandparents, being tucked into bed by grandma and hearing the deep men’s voices lull me to sleep.
For Christmas one year, my younger brother wanted buy me a new fragrance. He went in and chose one he thought smelt of me. He stayed a while in the shop until he found the right one. 6 months before, my boyfriend bought me the same scent!
My scent memories include when I was a child going to parks and smelling roses, collecting the petals and putting them in a glass mixing sugar & water and loving the lovely smells. I thought I could mix a lovely fragrance.
My scent memories go back to a very young age and are connected to both people and places. My mother’s favourite flower, lilies, were the scent of our home. My hometown, Kavala-Greece, was an important production centre of tobacco, a scent that I remember vividly even today. Same applies to the scents of freshly made coffee, spices and sweets. Greece being a bridge between the East and the West meant that many raw materials passed through the country, leaving their scented trail behind. My grandfather would wear woody, musky, darker notes which to me translated to strength and security. On the other hand, my grandmother had a garden full of flowers: her gardenias were so beautiful and fragile that she would not allow us to smell them. I remember getting many times into trouble for doing so, that’s why I started to observe them and paint them instead. It comes at no surprise that our collection at Manos Gerakinis Parfums is a refined balance of notes, feelings and positivity.
I was a well behaved child, generally speaking, but at the age of two I had one day of behaving badly.
The coup de grâce on my trail of unexpectedly naughty acts (stepping into a bucket of soapy water in my socks and shoes, squirting orange squash over the breakfast table…) was to pick buds off our beautifully aromatic mock orange bush and shove them up my nose so I could carry the fragrance around with me. This still seems quite reasonable. I was hurled into the pram with my baby sister and pushed at a sprint to the doctor’s surgery.
Despite the indignity of having them picked out of my nose with tweezers, the fragrance of the mock orange remains one of my favourites.
The Fragrance Foundation UK 
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