I bought this moisturiser yesterday. I have to admit I love love love Aesop products, but they’re not exactly cheap. But they’re not that expensive either, I guess when you compare them to some others. Anyway, being the starving student/artist that I have been for the last couple of years, I have been on a strict no-frills skincare budget, with not-so-great results. So when I walked past the delectable Aesop corner store in North Melbourne yesterday, I impulsively rushed in and bought a jar. Ooh, the shop was full of lovely little brown bottles and jars of lotions and potions. And smells of lavender stem, rosewater and bergamot. Too, too lovely.
This morning, when I put the moisturiser on, all of a sudden I was in Cairns, and for an instant in a campsite on Cape York, wearing green fisherman’s pants, sitting on a log and writing with a pink pen in a journal. This is the power of scent – to transport one to a far-off place, far-off in time and space. I must have bought that moisturiser once before, and taken it with me when I went to far north Queensland in 2006. I don’t remember actually doing that, but the strength of the smell-memory tells me it must be so. The feeling of being in that place is incredibly vivid, stirring up memories I didn’t even know that I had.