Stop and smell the Mecca perfume: My love letter to the underrated sense

The eleventh floor of the Reserve Bank Building has a great vantage point of the capital.  It’s adjacent to the Beehive. You can see the ocean and observe the ferries float through the harbour.

For a city filled with evergreens, it’s special to see the deciduous trees change season to season. Sometimes you even distract yourself from your work and observe the corporate window cleaners abseil up and down. New Zealand’s most influential leaders become tiny ants sipping on their nectar in a courtyard at Huxley’s Bar behind the Parliament building. Last year, a tree was uprooted from the grounds, it was quite the rustle of activity.  

Exciting as these sights may seem from a distance, I’m often left daydreaming and wondering what it must be like to be there and experience the smells from the ground. Do you smell the ocean or the petrol from the ferry? As the leaves turn green to brown, why does it smell more musky? What detergent are the window cleaners using? Are our leaders sipping on coffee, or treating themselves to an early midday cocktail? How dusty was it uprooting that tree and where did she relocate to? 

With my albinism, glare through the windows, blinds shut or unshut, windows clean or unclean, affects my vision and how I work. Considered heavenly to some, working in an overly light exposed workplace causes me pain and strain in my eyes. I numb my pain to cater to my colleagues who favour the vantage point and insist on keeping the blinds up. In meetings, I strategically pick a spot where I think glare will be minimal. I’ve adapted over time and if I sit looking away from the window, I guess that makes the glare go away right?  

Using my sense of smell has been a strategy to cope with working in an overly bright work environment. Taking time during my break to visit Mecca or a department store to smell perfume energises me and gives me a break from over-utilising my most vulnerable sense. In fact, it was a recent visit to the makeup store that inspired me to write this piece after one fragrance tickled my nose. Smelling the different notes in a fragrance also helps me escape the urban city and transports me to a different place for a brief moment - especially when travelling or navigating different locations and terrain and access for those with disabilities can be a challenge.   

It’s through scents that the outdoors are brought indoors. The country meadow is now at nose length and without the hayfever symptoms. Lilies distilled in a bottle means no need to navigate a valley. The notes of a coconut saves us a trip to a tropical beach. Thorns make it pretty tricky to hold a rose and it’s definitely easier to hold a small glass bottle. The alluring scent of tobacco makes me content, rather than picking up a bad habit. A perfume I own smells of dark rum. I can enjoy aspects of my favourite liquor without the lingering hangover.  Why move to the country when you can have peaches in a bottle? 

Additionally, scents rely on a person's personality and individuality - their own imagination and internal experience. Every perfumer who’s created a scent had a vision to capture a moment or memory with the intention to transport us away from the everyday or, in this case - a glarey office. 

For me, that scent was Miami Nectar by Ellis Brooklyn that made me escape reality temporarily. It smells lush, extravagant and tempting. Even the name is enough to make you want to pack a suitcase. The colour of the bottle is the perfect shade of a swimming pool gleaming in the afternoon sun. A lush and extravagant tropical curated fragrance. Miami Nectar is a scene-stealing perfume, opening with pink pineapple and coconut water, and backed by plumeria, vanilla, sweet amber and salted woods. Perhaps I’ll make it to Miami one day. In the meantime, I’ll keep daydreaming.

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