sathari: Vayne and Larsa Solidor from FFXII (Solidor brothers)
We're gonna do this. ([personal profile] sathari) wrote in [community profile] smellsgood 2014-04-04 10:21 pm (UTC)

Synaesthesia with my perfumes: the two I'm most conscious of right now are Dee and Jezebel, both from BPAL. Dee: as I said over in the thread I linked above, "sniffing it on me is the mental equivalent of curling up in an overstuffed leather armchair in front of a roaring fire and that is just the beginning of my description". I can see/feel the fire, and the dark stone room with no light but the fire, and the deep brown leather armchair, and the plaid fuzzy blanket I'm wrapped in, and the mug of dark hot tea on the table--- all from a sniff of Dee on my skin! If I'm going for a quicker description, "it smells warm and brown" would be what I'd say about it (so temperature-feels as well as color ones!)

Jezebel is a little less thorough in its imagery for me: I'm wearing it right now, and it's the color of honey and sand and sunsets and just a hint of something green, and something orange-and-red and blossoming, and the feel of a kind of humid almost-warmth. It's kind of a desert-after-the-rain scent to me (not that I know what actual deserts smell like after rains), which brings me to my next point...

Characters you associate with certain scents: there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that the "cactus-flower perfume" that I have been known to write Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca from Final Fantasy XII as wearing? Smells exactly like Jezebel even though it would be made from different things in her world (like, um, actual cactus flowers, lol) than it is in ours. Similarly, I am developing whole headcanon structures around the rules for the different Archadian Houses' scents, based around the use of sandalwood and pine "chops" as social currency/markers in canon. (All of which is actually no more nor less than a way to explain exactly why the scent that Vayne Solidor always wears smells uncannily like BPAL's Bow and Crown of Conquest. Which in turn has to do with the cedar note in it and the existence of cedar chops as an Imperial-family-exclusive status mark--- I just basically have a chicken-or-egg problem: did the Solidors get a House scent blended for them with cedar in it because cedar chops were used by the Imperial family and they were marking/staking their turf, or did they start using cedar chops as an Imperial-family-only symbol after they took the Imperial throne, because it was part of their House's signature scent? Oh, decisions, decisions!) Likewise, I am trying to pick an awesome sandalwood scent for House Bunansa, so that I know what Balthier wears when he's feeling nostalgic or embittered, or needs to prove a point/establish his status at a visceral level to an Archadian.)

Those are the ones I have a lot of current headcanon about, and strangely I don't have a lot of scent thoughts for characters from other games (except that I seem to have adopted the broad general bit of fanon that SOLDIERs from FFVII are hypersensitive to scent and probably don't wear cologne etc. even when they're not in the field.) On the other hands, back when the first Iron Man movie came out I amused myself imagining someone telling Tony Stark about BPAL and him promptly trying a variety of the scents with sexually suggestive names, especially names that he would see as letting him introduce the topic of his own sexuality into the conversation, like Casanova and Golden Priapus, lol. Also, Padme Amidala from the Star Wars prequel trilogy has a scent with plum notes in it but I don't know what else or what the scent is!

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