MEMORIA, part one: church incense perfumes

in nomine patris, et filii, et scentictus sancti

I know I’ve gone down a bit of an apostolic church perfume rabbit hole lately. I won’t pretend it’s not because I am also going through a bit of an apostolic church rabbit hole lately, but I would prefer to have the emotional details of this spiritual journey remain implicitly told through my evolving relationship to perfume. This is all to say, I now believe I have smelled almost every single church incense perfume currently in production, not counting those serendipitous associations laypeople make between generally smoky-amber ambers and their own contrived memories of mass or liturgy. I won’t pretend I don’t harbor a bit of judgment for when someone says that something like CK Obsession smells like a church (I would say it leans more Duran Duran album cover art), only because having now gone to many different Catholic and Orthodox services in which frankincense and myrrh were burned, it is a very specific smell. My olfactory fascination with how this smell functions has almost beg…