Perfume: The 1980s scents that defined my childhood (2025)

If there was one perfume that symbolised the 1980s, it had to be Giorgio Beverly Hills. At the time its yellow and white stripy box was ubiquitous on dressing tables in northern England. Cocktail bars, discotheques and beauty parlours dripped with the fragrance. Giorgio was … Dallas and Dynasty. Big hair and shoulder pads. Diamanté earrings. Effervescent patterns. The sort of scent that characters from Jilly Cooper’s Rivals or Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives would wear by day and then between the sheets. Its brash and uncompromising floral sillage was unmistakable. It was so immensely popular, yet equally so widely disliked, that in some restaurants wearers were barred from entering due to its power to obliterate the aroma of food.

Sadly, that rule did not extend to Leeds. All the glamorous women wore it like a badge of pride. It was sprayed into hair, clothes, between the thighs and on both wrists at least three times a day. This was a provocative perfume that demanded attention, a power move that could hypnotise men into submission, one with enough chutzpah to dominate a room. In the era of Thatcher and Reagan the modern woman desired an image of raunchy elegance, physical freedom and personal independence. If any perfume represented that, it was this one. One spritz of Giorgio could metamorphose a “Dowdy Sue”. Success was finally within reach. For many, the perfume was a marker of aspiration. Giorgio was the smell of a woman who had made it.

The master perfumer Francis Kurkdjian once said, “Perfume is the art that makes memory speak,” and revisiting some of these fragrances that mapped my early years has informed the concept behind my memoir, Base Notes: The Scents of a Life. By returning to Giorgio, for example, I was able to access scenes, situations and characters that were innately connected to that one bottle, which had stamped its mark on my memory.

Indeed, the powerful scent of Giorgio frequently emanated from the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire in my mother’s hairdressing salon, Reflections. As the first perfume to appear as a scented strip, it was glued neatly into advertising campaigns, and the salon girls rubbed their wrists into the pages each morning before their early clients arrived. It was a status brand — one that symbolised recklessness, defiance or an appetite for life. Giorgio was so strong it overrode the perming lotion, bleach-blotted highlighting caps and smouldering Silk Cuts that filled the salon’s heavy air.

As the connection between scent and memory is so deeply enmeshed (it is arguably our oldest sense from an evolutionary perspective), one whiff of this perfume is enough to provoke a Proustian rush. When I imagine those days from my youth I am back sitting on the salon’s waiting banquette, one furnished with the latest Laura Ashley fabric, and on my lap is a magazine with the distinctive notes of apricot, bergamot, orchid, rose, ylang-ylang, patchouli and vanilla rising from its pages. My younger self is wondering if by rubbing my wrists into the scented strip — like Dorothy clicking her shoes in The Wizard of Oz — I will be transported into a far more compelling reality. The impossibly grey, unendingly drab environment of the Yorkshire brewery town where I grew up was transformed by the possibilities of an alternative life, one offered in the pages of the glossy magazines.

But it was Dior’s Poison — with an amethyst bottle that resembled forbidden fruit — that, for me, packed the biggest punch of that time. I recall my mother bringing it home one Christmas — it had been regifted by a customer — and tearing open the green marble box to reveal what was hidden inside: a mystical, occult-like design, reminiscent of the evil queen’s apple in Snow White, complete with a crystalline stopper. Together we unleashed the exotic fragrance as she sprayed it on to her wrists before the nuclear scent became so overpowering, she was forced to spend the next hour in the bathtub attempting to scour off every trace.

Like Giorgio, Poison was popular in the hairdressing world, yet for her this fragrance had the Marmite effect: no matter how sumptuous the adverts or how delectable the packaging, the perfume itself — a potent blend of star anise, vetiver, carnation, cinnamon, heliotrope, labdanum and jasmine — was a step too far for her personal taste. As with Mugler’s Angel, which followed in the 1990s, Poison was ultimately divisive.

Despite my mother’s aversion to Poison, I was fascinated by the packaging, and would often sneak into her bedroom to hold what I believed in my child’s imagination to be a bottle of fairytale significance. If its adverts were to be believed, I too could become like the model Isabelle Adjani, complete with purple lips, wrapped in velvet and silk, stalked by a black panther in the dead of night.

Prior to Mum’s obsession with Giorgio, Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche was her scent of choice, and I recall the blue and black aluminium bottle she sprayed on her neck before work each day, the heady notes of aldehydes, honeysuckle, peach, iris and sandalwood coating her clothes and hair. When her back was turned I would copy her actions, then experiment by mixing it with drops from the barely used bottle of Opium on her dresser, and a squirt of Right Guard in the palm of my hand. Which, as one can imagine, was enough to trigger migraines in all who encountered it.

Perfume, more than any other cosmetic object in our household, opened a door into an alternative reality. Yet by the time I was old enough to purchase my own in the 1990s, the infamous scents of our mother’s generation had rapidly fallen out of fashion. Instead, my generation adopted lighter, cleaner scents — starting with The Body Shop’s White Musk and Dewberry at school, followed by the unisex CK One (the Britpop indie disco classic choice) and then the chic, aquatic L’Eau d’Issey. These were our rebellious brands, shaking off the cloying residue of fragrances from the previous era. A reaction to what had gone before.

Yet now, many decades later, I am unable to tolerate those 1990s scents; they are far too sickly or sweet for my olfactory palate. As our bodies and hormones change over time, so does our taste for perfume. What once was cherished is now overpowering. It is a natural progression.

With the age of 50 not too far off, no longer do I chase the airy fragrances of my youth, preferring now to wear Le Labo’s Another 13. A woody oriental, it has a raw, animalistic tone buried in its depths and requires only a small amount to last a day. On first inhaling a sample, I was immediately transfixed and felt as if I had finally found the elusive perfect scent. It has much in common with the perfumes of our mothers’ generation in terms of its muscular reach but not in terms of packaging. A glass vial with a personalised label and a simple brown card box is Le Labo’s unique design, a contemporary approach that is at odds with what went before. It doesn’t advertise itself in the traditional way, and its manifesto states how it was “created as a … desire to rebel against the rising tide of conformity”, an ethos and attitude that resonates. Perhaps Le Labo is the ultimate brand of the modern era, one much imitated but impossible to replicate.

Base Notes by Adelle Stripe (Orion £20 pp288). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members