Story of a scent

as a 14-year-old girl in the mid-1990s, society was changing, and so was I. We mourned Kurt Cobain and celebrated Girl Power. I could never have articulated the ways in which grunge and feminism were taking already-shifting gender roles and marketing them to us, but I sensed it and I smelled of it. My first fragrance was a classic invention of the era: CK One, by Calvin Klein. It smelled fresh, rebellious, and with its scent of green tea and top notes of citrus, full of energy and promise.

Through all this, my relationship with my identity – as the only brown girl at my single-sex school in leafy, white Wimbledon – bubbled away like a troubled current. I was conscious of my otherness, of not fitting in, of not being as British as everyone else. I moved away from the UK, getting my first job as a developer to improve human rights and democracy in Senegal, on the western tip of Africa.

I loved the sunshine, the Wolof language, the heavily seasoned fresh fish, the sense of community, and being surrounded by a rich African heritage and centuries- old black civilisation. But I missed the English seasons, the fruit trees, even the rain. After one homesick trip back to London, I found my nostalgia bottled in duty free. Un Jardin Après La Mousson, by Hermès [£61]– a richer, fresh-meets-spicy scent with a sophisticated blend of ginger, nutty cardamom and grassy vetiver – a fitting ode to both my years spent living in the spicy heat and the rain-soaked English garden of my childhood. My taste had matured, and so had I.