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There’s a reason perfume commercials aren’t close-up images of the ingredients noted in a specific fragrance. Instead, they’re sweeping landscapes, a beautiful man on a galloping horse, a wistful goodbye between two lovers with no backstory. That’s because scent isn’t simply the notes — say vanilla, sandalwood, tuberose; it’s about the feeling they evoke. It’s more effective to produce a visceral reaction than provide a technical definition. It makes sense, as scent is processed by the limbic system, the part of the brain that handles emotion and memory. So when Anna Dorn texts to ask me what I want to smell like, she provides some thought-starters that sound like treatments for big-budget fragrance ads: “like a library in ancient Egypt,” or “like Persephone rising from the ashes.”
Dorn is a prolific author of three novels and a memoir, “Bad Lawyer,” where she divulges secrets from her past life as a reluctant lawyer trying to meet her family’s expectations. She also moonlights as a perfume stylist, offering scent fittings for clients performed over text message. It’s not an established side hustle, but if there was ever a city where it could thrive, it would be Los Angeles.
I’ve hired Dorn to help me find a new scent, something more adventurous than my current Sephora-grade options. My hope is that like with a romantic match, I’ll find something that ticks the boxes, but ultimately has an unspoken variable I’m drawn to. It’s a task well worth her $150 fee. The service promises eight tiny vials of custom-selected scents shipped directly to me. The product is included in Dorn’s fee, which means she pockets around $70 per session, but to her, it’s a labor of love she is happy to spend hours on. My inquiry comes at the perfect time to offer a distraction from working on her forthcoming novel “American Spirits,” out next April with Simon & Schuster.
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As a writer, I’m disappointed I don’t have a well-crafted scene to give Dorn as an example of how I want to smell. But Dorn is adaptable; many of her clients are amateur perfume wearers like me. She peels back and asks what fragrances I already own and love. I provide a list: Glossier You, Versace Crystal Noir, Maison Margiela Jazz Club. Scents I’ve loved for years but I know are just the tip of the iceberg. She asks about notes I’m interested in. I tell her I like the tobacco, masculine energy of Jazz Club. “I used to think I didn’t like floral, but I realized I do when paired with spicier, woodsier notes,” I say. She is quick to reply, explaining she once thought she was too tough for florals. She already has some ideas, which she categorizes as “baddie florals.”
Dorn’s knowledge and love of fragrance comes through in her work, notably in her most recent novel, “Perfume & Pain.” “In the beginning, the novel had nothing to do with perfume, I just liked the title — which I jacked from a 1950s out-of-print lesbian pulp novel,” she says, “but then I started collecting all this niche perfume knowledge and I knew I had to put it into the book. Once the book came out, I had all these new ‘fraghead’ followers, some of whom have become friends and my perfume obsession just continued.”
Despite her obsession, her Los Feliz apartment isn’t a storage unit of scents. When it comes to full-size bottles, Dorn says she only keeps about five at a time, taking to eBay to sell lightly used bottles to make room for new ones. She estimates her collection of decants — the insider term for 2-milliliter bottle samples, which she orders from the website DecantPlanet for between $4 and $12 — is in the hundreds.
I’m intrigued by Dorn’s suggestion of “baddie florals,” but I want to make sure I don’t end up with a grab bag of grandma scents. (Think the infamous, but simply too strong for me, Chanel Number 5.) Dorn immediately clocks my concern and deploys more jargon. “Contemp [contemporary] andro [androgynous] florals, got it,” she replies. I try my best to reply with moody adjectives instead of notes. I hope for something sexy, mysterious and fresh from nature. Something that seems foreign, not simply tropical, but dare I use it in this context, exotic.
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“How do you feel about a heady, narcotic, floral? Is that too femme?” Dorn asks me. It sounds aligned with the adjectives I gave, but I’m unsure what narcotic means in this context. “In the Victorian era they allegedly didn’t let virgin women smell tuberose because they thought it would make them spontaneously orgasm,” Dorn clarifies. It feels like a challenge. I tell her I’m interested in tuberose.
Dorn has an idea and texts back quickly to ask if I am open to mainstream designers. In order to maximize her expertise over, say, a Sephora employee, I decide against it. I’m already worried my favorite scent, Jazz Club, which sells at mainstream mall retainers, has become too well known. “I don’t want to smell like everyone else,” I confess. Everyone probably says that.
Dorn’s passion project is perfectly timed. Scent is taking center stage in beauty circles — the same way skincare was once the if-you-know-you-know conversation bubbling under the surface of a makeup tutorial, fragrance is where professional beauty critics and the everyday obsessed are having the most nuanced conversations. Dorn thinks the growing appreciation for niche fragrances was born during the pandemic, when she advanced from a lifelong lover of body sprays and soap scents to a reader and commenter on Fragrantica, a fragrance website with its own Reddit-like forums. Post-pandemic, she began frequenting L.A. shops Scent Room, Scent Bar, Le Pink & Co and Beverly Hills Perfumery, befriending sales associates and “nerding out together.”
She’s not the only writer who is applying her love of storytelling and world-building to fragrance fandom. Los Angeles-based Arabelle Sicardi, writer of the newsletter “You’ve Got Lipstick on Your Chin,” offers a virtual nose-training course. Sicardi ships participants a box of 40 objects and leads discussions on the properties of each, establishing the “building blocks” of a scent. If texting Dorn descriptions of scents seemed too abstract for me, a podcast seems like an even more difficult medium to describe scent. Yet New York City-based writers Tynan Buck and Sable Yong have hosted the popular podcast “Smell Ya Later” for five years.
There’s clearly a connection between prose lovers and nuanced noses, and I want to join the club. I think of the phrases Dorn deployed in our text messages and instead of giggling, I’m impressed. I know the pain of finding the right adjective for a situation. I find that I’m less interested in Dorn’s mastery of the scents themselves than in the way she conjures them with words and decides how to pair them with real-life situations. My journey has become less about finding a singular scent than developing the confidence to articulate the right scent for the right occasion, celebrating the multitudes we contain rather than putting them all under one aromatic umbrella.
Less than a week after my half-hour text conversation with Dorn, a small package arrives at my door with decants of her eight selections. Each bottle holds about 20 sprays. DecantPlanet threw in three free vials and a signed, handwritten note on the receipt, a touch that further convinces me of the thoughtfulness of scent lovers. Within hours of receiving my package, an email appears from Dorn outlining her selections by name with notes and reference points to my existing collection, as well as a backstory of each brand.
The first scent I try is Moonmilk by Stora Skuggan. I’m intrigued by Dorn’s use of “creamy” to describe its sandalwood. At first, I worry I’ve over-applied, but as I finish getting ready — arguably my favorite part of any night — the scent settles into an earthy depth I can’t place without Dorn’s cliff notes but know I like. It’s the most abstract of the bunch, inspired by “liquid deposits in limestone caves,” something I’ve never encountered and likely never will. True to her narcotic floral promise and tuberose history lesson, Dorn includes Moon Bloom by Hiram Green from the Netherlands. There is no spontaneous orgasm, but it smells like the marriage of the musky scents and warm and spicy florals (called “oriental florals” by the industry) in my entry-level collection. I like to wear it during the day.
I put my new vials in a little jar on my vanity. They’re still foreign to me, so I pull up Dorn’s email to remind myself which has “creamy woods” or “subtle gin.” Where I once thought having an expected, signature scent was a sign of adulthood and knowing yourself, I see why Dorn opts for hundreds of decants instead of a dozen chic bottles displayed. I’m having a lot more fun with my curated choose-your-own-adventure, building my arsenal of fantasies that are one spritz away.
Lina Abascal is a writer and filmmaker born and raised in Los Angeles. She is the author of “Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the dancefloor” and director of the award-winning short documentary “Stud Country.”
