Base Notes: This memoir recalls the perfumes that shaped 90s teendom

We may have expensive dreams, but very few of us have ready access to luxury. We’re besieged by grandiose advertisements that suggest alternate worlds of decadence, success and sensuality. Perfume is one of the few ways we can possess or imaginatively experience this kind of fantasy – it’s a token, a portal. 

Author and journalist Adelle Stripe was just a child in the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster in the 80s when she first encountered the fantastical potential of perfume. Hanging around in her mother’s hair salon, she poured over the glossy magazines on the coffee table in the reception. “If you’re growing up in some shitty northern backwater and you’ve got no money, you open up these magazines and you’re immediately taken into this fantasy world and you want to be able to achieve that on a semi-daily basis. You can’t afford luxury, you’re never going to afford couture, but what you can afford is a bottle of perfume, and that is aspirational in itself.”

Speaking over Zoom from her book-lined office, she recalls that time. “Imagery in 1980s perfume advertising was absolutely wild – there was nothing minimalist about it. But what I remember most vividly is the smell that used to emerge from the pages because the adverts all had scented strips.” Not only were the names of these perfumes so redolent of intoxication – Poison and Opium etc – but the scents themselves were heavy and potent. “I found the smells overwhelming, as you do when you’re a child. The girls in the salon would tear open the magazines as soon as they arrived and rub them onto their wrists and they’d smell of Obsession or Anais Anais for the day, or whatever it was that happened to be enclosed in the magazines.”

Stripe began writing about the definitive perfumes she remembered from her youth. She found it enabled her to access latent memories of growing up and to conjure and explicate her recollections of her mother – an extraordinary “high glamour” hairdresser and “working-class capitalist” who loved Jilly Cooper and Margaret Thatcher alike, and whose memory casts a long and inimitable shadow in Stripe’s life. What began as straight-up non-fiction features on fragrances such as Rive Gauche, Dewberry and “the ubiquitous” Georgio Beverly Hills evolved into a series of autobiographical vignettes. “I realised the memoir aspect was far more compelling than the actual factual writing I’d done. I didn’t want to write a non-fiction account of perfume, I wanted it to be more personal, because perfume is so personal, isn’t it? It takes us to another place. When we smell it, we’re immediately transported to a place in time, another era. It has the ability to let us travel.” 

Perfume is so personal, isn’t it? It takes us to another place. When we smell it, we’re immediately transported to a place in time, another era – Adelle Stripe

What emerged was Base Notes: The Scents of a Life (published by White Rabbit), Stripe’s poignant and grimly hilarious memoir that takes us through her youth, the subcultures, the early sexual encounters and formative experiences, a lot of near-misses, the inevitable ideological and sartorial clashes with her mother, a series of dead-end jobs (including working on a late night chat line), spans the 1990s and the early 2000s and encompassing spells in the north, peak-indie sleaze London and an ill-fated trip to New York City before, ultimately, finding a kind of peaceful equilibrium on the other side of the turmoil of growing up. Perfume not only provides the prism through which she, and we, enter into these vignettes – it’s the architecture on which Stripe’s memories are hung; scent is bound inextricably to memory. 

Yet, like memory, scent isn’t always consistent and reliable – it is liable to evolve and change. “My sense of smell is different now to how it was when I was younger,” she explains. “While writing the book, as part of my research, I went into Boots and sprayed on CK One because I loved it when I was a teenager. I cannot bear it now.” She laughs, “I asked my husband to guess what perfume I was wearing. He smelled my neck and immediately said, ‘Juicy Fruit, speed come-down, Embassy Reds, brit pop.’ He just recognised that era immediately.” 

While being unflinching and brutally honest, Base Notes is incredibly compassionate. At the conclusion of this journey – mediated by sense memories of Trésor, Angel, Brut, L’Eau D’Issey, Hugo and many more – the place Stripe arrives is self-acceptance. “I carried a lot of shame and remorse and negativity towards my younger self, but the more distance I got from my youth, the more at peace I felt with it.” The prose is redolent of all fragrances it recalls, it vividly evokes a sense of time and place, but it also exudes warmth and humour. Stripe is such a generous writer who extends kindness to her younger self as well as the formidable women who came before her. Something she said in our chat that stayed with me was: “As you look back, you come to realise that a lot of the struggles you have are a continuation of your mother’s struggles, or what had happened to her as a result of her mother.”

Visit the gallery above for a few photographs from the author’s personal archive. 

Base Notes: The Scents of a Life by Adelle Stripe is published by White Rabbit and is available to buy now from your local independent bookshop.