There was a Bath & Body Works fragrance in the nineties called Flowering Herbs.
My wife was given a bottle of it in 1994, four years before I met her. She was still wearing it in 1998, the summer we got together — we both turned twenty that year, she’s two and a half months older than me — and every time she came near me that summer she smelled like that.
They discontinued it.
I have spent a substantial part of the last thirty years trying to get more of it.
You can still find bottles on eBay if you’re patient and willing to be unreasonable. I have been both. The last one I bought cost me two hundred dollars.
Sometime in the late 2000s they brought it back as part of a heritage collection. Ten dollars a bottle, sitting on a shelf like it was nothing.
I bought a couple.
I’ve thought about that a lot since. Twenty of them would have covered the rest of her life for two hundred dollars, which is exactly what I later handed a stranger on the internet for one used bottle.
I’ve also just asked.
I’ve stood at the counter in a Bath & Body Works and asked employees how a person goes about ordering custom bottles of a discontinued scent. One woman was genuinely game — said she’d reach out to corporate and see whether they’d sell me some at a reasonable price.
I never heard anything back. I don’t blame them. I imagine that request goes into a system that has no field for it.
I’ll keep checking eBay.
Here’s what I can’t explain properly to anyone who asks why.
It doesn’t smell like a fragrance to me. It smells like being twenty. It smells like a summer where nothing had gone wrong yet and I had just met the most interesting person I’d ever met. It smells like freedom, and like getting away with something, and like my best friend.
Twenty-eight years together and one bottle of it will still put me somewhere no photograph gets me to. I don’t know why smell does that and almost nothing else does.
So if anybody at that company is ever bored and looking for a project.
There’s a man in Oklahoma who would very much like to buy ten bottles of Flowering Herbs at whatever reasonable price you want to name, and he’s been at this a long time, and he isn’t going to stop.
David Willis 