Awesome Olfactory Auras

Is there anything better than the smell of Jasmine tea brewing? Mmmm, I love Jasmine tea pearls. I'm currently at a coffee shop that serves jasmine tea bags with actual jasmine pearls in "single silken satchets," very classy, if you ask me. The company is Harney & Sons: Master Tea Blenders - located in Salisbury, Connecticut. 

Back to olfactory sensations; what are the best fragrances in the world? As I mentioned, I love the smell of jasmine tea - I would wear it as a scent if someone found a true-to-life parfume. Another of my favorite smells is gardenia, and you can find this for cheap at any parfumerie.  Cheap or expensive, it's always delicious.  I even ran across a gardenia tree at the local gardening shop in town and, despite the fact that the flowers were wilting, they still smelled just as delicious as my mom used to when I was a child and she wore gardenia (which is probably why I'm so fond of it in the first place).


As a sidenote, if you're ever in New Orleans and you're looking for perfume, I highly suggest Hove Parfumeur. I was first introduced to Hove in Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume, in which it is thinly disguised as the  "Parfumerie Devalier," run by the 'Queen of the Good Smells,' Madame Devalier, and is described as a producer of "moon medicine and jazz powders. Lucky root and come-together potent. Mojo cream and loa lotion. Hurricane drops, kill-me-not juice, coonass courting pomade and a special 'oil of midnight' that had nothing to do with overtime at the office" (9).  Even more urgent than my recommendation that you visit Hove, I implore you to stop whatever you're doing, cast away whatever garbage you might be reading at the moment, and read Jitterbug Perfume.  It's a lovely little ditty.  And if you ever run across the Jamaican Jasmine so highly sought after in Robbins' parfumerie, buy all you can, and send me some!

I see I have again wandered away from my original intent, which was to compile a list of my favorite smells.  I hope my list is slightly more interesting than the lists I have found online, which are predictable and cliched.  A baby's smell, really?  One's own smelly pillow?  Though I've heard that smells are the most acute memory triggers, I will make a conscious effort not to let pleasant memories block my olfactory sensors.  So, here's my valiant attempt:

- jasmine tea
- gardenia
- the aftersmell of basil after touching a live basil plant
- freshly baked granola
- the breath of a handsome man who has recently (but not too recently) smoked a cigarette and is probably drinking a cocktail as well...
(man, this is hard...)

I can think of a lot of disgusting smells:
-- a newly smashed lady bug
-- the rubber face of an old Cabbage Patch Kid
-- coffee breath
-- dog poo
-- cigarette smoke
-- sulfur at hot springs and other variations of boiled egg in nature (ie - showers in certain vacation locales)

And I can think of smells I, personally, like:
-- gasoline
-- sharpie
-- the sulfur of a struck match

But coming up with universally superior smells, maybe I should leave that to the professional smellers out there.