Youth Dew - my childhood perfume memory

Youth Dew by Estee Lauder. Misnamed?

There are some scents that have been so popular for so long, that they must surely provoke Proustian memories by the thousand. This is a tale of one of those perfumes.

A couple of months ago I found an almost empty bottle of Youth Dew on my gatepost. It was almost as if I'd attached a sign to announce 'perfume fanatic, this way'. The real reason was that the council's recycling department had left it on the pavement, and a neighbour had tidied it a bit.

It got me thinking. Did I know what it smelled like? Well, no. So while I was stuck in Heathrow - again - I remembered the curious incident of the scent on the gatepost and gave it a sniff. And that's where it got even more curious.

In the back of my olfactory memory I'd stored my evidence in what perfume smells like. A favourite aunt and a glamorous neighbour who worked in the local department store's beauty counter were the only people I knew who wore perfume all the time. So I'd learned early that perfume has one definitive scent; that all others - no matter how beautiful - seemed like mere variations. 

I own over 300 bottles now, including classics that existed long before Youth Dew was blended and bottled. But Youth Dew is that scent. Not Chanel No 5.0, not Mitsouko, not Miss Dior. This one. That's my childhood memory of perfume.

So instead of flowers defining my baseline, I had spiced powder. The name and the scent have a dissonance, don't you think? Youth Dew seems innocuous and light. But this smell is darkly seductive, polished, structured and groomed. This scent wears a corset and plucks its eyebrows. But perhaps it forgets to wash the dishes. It's Joan in Mad Men. Roger might buy her Chanel No 5 to impress her, but she buys this for herself. And she can happily go into a carpeted department store and ask a patronising assistant for a bottle of Youth Dew without anyone raising their eyebrows. Perhaps that was its secret.

Youth Dew dates from an era when the smell was the reason women chose a signature scent. Forget the name, the box and the advertising, and go smell it. Observe the sensually slim ballgown bottle though, and when it's empty put it on a gatepost one day.