What Happens When Everyone Smells Good, But No One Smells Like Themselves?

Davidoff Cool Water and the boy in Class 6A. I must have been eleven, maybe twelve. It was cold, as it always was in Darjeeling. His skin still pink and damp from the shower, smelling like adolescent machismo and the sea.

That was my first experience of want— the understanding that desire grows like an ache and announces itself with a growl. Like you hadn't eaten in days and were promised the first bite at a feast.

It has been almost two decades since that afternoon, but I've chased that feeling every time I smell a scent. That churn in the stomach—attraction or panic, I couldn't tell. But that was the first time I knew what I wanted. What made me different. The base notes that defined me.

Scent is the monarch of senses—it does what taste cannot, what touch often won't. It clings to the memory the way flesh clings to bone, which is why you might find yourself flagging down a cab for the lady in the beige cardigan. She smiles in gratitude as the powdery smell of Lakme Perfecting Liquid Foundation engulfs you. Suddenly, you’re nine again, watching your mother apply her make-up, her collarbones more delicate than the pearls resting on them. The eyes forget—but the nose remembers.

I miss that about people and their perfumes. What do you do when everyone smells good—but no one smells like themselves?

Today, everyone’s a Good Girl Gone Bad, a Spicebomb, a Sauvage. You walk into Jhaveri Contemporary and realise everyone must’ve read the same New York Times piece on Santal 33. There’s sandalwood and iris in the air—but the boys from 6A are nowhere to be found.

“Sometimes, choosing a scent feels more about standing out than reflecting your soul,” says Simi Dewan, Deputy General Manager & Country Head, Pan India Business, L’Occitane en Provence. Even the most skilled noses can’t dictate how a fragrance will make you feel. “They can blend notes that evoke nostalgia, warmth, longing… but how it lands always depends on the wearer. That’s the magic of scent—it completes itself in memory.”

It doesn’t just complete itself in memory; scent is memory, distilled. Unlike sight or sound, which first pass through the brain’s filters, smell travels directly to the amygdala and hippocampus— the centres of memory and emotion.

It’s why Rizwan Bachav experiences a Proustian moment when he steps into a decadent-smelling elevator. Why he can still recall specific friends purely by the perfumes they wore as teenagers. “It’s like scent stamps a memory more vividly than anything else,” says Bachav, who considers fragrance a powerful extension of personality. Ganymede by Marc-Antoine Barrois is his signature scent: mandarin, leather and a sharp tang of metal when he moves—like tasting blood. Warm, kind but not over-familiar.

Not everyone mourns the loss of a signature scent. Take Vidushi Vijayvergiya, for example. A sixth-generation perfumer, she finds the idea of a “fragrance wardrobe” liberating. “The fact that we feel differently on different occasions can now extend to having a unique scent for each mood or moment,” she says.

Interestingly, her bestseller is First Rain, a perfume that captures petrichor—the sigh of scorched earth touched by rain.

To me, First Rain smells like a good day in class. An A+ on a math test, cheese sandwiches for lunch, meeting Elizabeth Bennet for the first time. Watching the street lamps turn on, knowing it was time to go home. We know what our childhood smells like—we’re less sure of the present.

Maybe that’s why First Rain stands out in her portfolio. Because, as she puts it, “it transports you to certain emotions instantly.”

Before algorithms took over our lives, fragrance was more functional than aesthetic—part of a morning ritual, an invisible extension of grooming, meant for no one else.

While Abhinav Verma acknowledges the performative edge to many things today, he’s quick to point to a shift back to authenticity. “It’s not about being noticed. It’s about wearing something that feels like you,” says Verma, CEO and co-founder of ARKS.

For ARKS Day, the line’s summer fragrance, his business partner Ranbir Kapoor brought in instinctive references— places, feelings, small memories—to shape the perfume’s mood and texture. While the base notes came from Kapoor’s life, the experience is meant to be personal.

“It’s something you experience up close,” Verma says. “Ranbir often spoke about it feeling effortless. That intimacy is what makes it special.”

I’m revisiting The Age of Innocence when Verma’s email arrives. On the page, Newland Archer has just entered Ellen Olenska’s room. It smells “of some far-off bazaar… Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.” Even in literature, scent becomes a kind of character study.

I often wonder what scent metaphors future writers will turn to. Not ambergris or Turkish coffee, perhaps. But then again, it isn’t the ambergris or the oud that makes a scent unique—it’s how it blends with your body chemistry, becoming something entirely your own. Diptyque Tam Dao with a trace of Dunhill for Shah Rukh Khan. The Architect’s Club, folded into Nescafé, for me. And Davidoff Cool Water, mingled with the sweetness of youth, for the boy in 6A.

Once in a while, it still finds me—in a silent theatre or on a rushed Monday morning. The recall is instant and vivid: wet curls, shirt clinging to his back, all crooked teeth and awkward limbs. Even now, my throat goes dry as neroli and amber stir the memory.

Bachav is seeing a shift toward niche perfumes now—scents that aren’t mass-produced. He believes it’s a collective attempt to rediscover individuality through fragrance.

I smile, cautiously hopeful.

To read more stories from Esquire India's August 2025 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.