Oriza L. Legrand: Relique D'Amour
The Sacred Scent of Snow and Stillness
Relique D’Amour was kindly shared with me by a total stranger, who told me it was known to smell like an old, abandoned church.
And it does.
I have since, thankfully, run across other people saying this is something that they love the idea of. Fragrance doesn’t have to be a fashion decoration, it can be a small indulgence that let’s us change the mindspace we wish to occupy.
The first fragrance to feel this much like an actual place to me was Demeter’s Holy Water. I felt knocked back with the emotions it triggered. I’ll save that experience for its own page, but for now, I’m happy to find a very similar one here.
Relique D’Amour is more about the grey stone and stained glass of said church, lined with green plants that somehow survived the freeze of winter and are still there sticking out of the wet, peaty soil. There is a surprising burst of lemon from this petrichor-style scent, but it manages only the beautifully overwhelming sense of wetness, without any of the sting that often spoils both lemon and aquatic scents for me. This is a more rounded lemon smell that freshens the sunny yet snow covered scene it invokes. Not all of us find grey days and ancient places solemn, and for those romantic souls, a scent like this a perfect mirror of the cheerfulness we feel from things that many others haven’t noticed are still vivid and alive.
As a goth-leaning teenager once upon a far away time, I sought magic in everything. I think a lot of people imagined that my picnics at the disused cemetery in my city, with just a couple of close friends, were some kind of obsession with darkness. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. We didn’t go there for anything other than the quiet and nature that was so hard to find anywhere else in our largely urban surroundings. We went there to sit and talk, relax and not make an unnecessarily scary or depressing scene about the people whose relics rest there. We all have loved ones who have passed, why should they be in anyone’s way, avoided or painted so negatively?
As an adult, I’ve since learned that a lot of people find beauty in such places. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with wallowing in negativity or some sense of macabre. It is, rather, an ability to see the beauty in everything—including impermanence—and to find peace in the cycle of life, death and rebirth. If we turn away from things like shadowy places and forgotten people, I think we miss out on whatever new form they now exist in. Things don’t cease to be a part of us just because they’ve taken on a new form.
Relics are precious because the passing of time touches us all. We don’t need to experience them as darkness—they can also carry the beauty of life. A fragrance like Relique D’Amour, by sharing its comforting beauty, can help us more easily dwell in the understanding that love is never really lost if we keep it safe in our memory.
