How Young Is Too Young for a First Perfume?

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Photographed by George Boo, Vogue, August 2013

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Over the past 18 years, Frédéric Malle has launched many fine fragrances under his Editions de Parfums label. But last year the Parisian tried his hand at something new—his first children’s perfume. Called Sale Gosse (playful translation: “spoiled brat”), the petitgrain-and-violet-spiked scent promptly became the It-baby gift among chic Europeans. Yet when Sale Gosse arrives in the U.S. this summer, it will be sold as an adult fragrance. Kids’ perfumes, it would seem, haven’t quite caught on here.

In the States, most girls and boys don’t get a spritz of “real” perfume or cologne until they’re 12 or 13, and it’s usually with something bought at a drugstore and misted on before a school dance. In Europe, Latin America, and other scent-forward parts of the world, though, the olfactory coming-of-age happens much earlier. Paris native Alexandra Roos—who, with her perfumer mother Chantal Roos, cofounded Roos & Roos fragrance house—cherished the bottle of Bonpoint Eau de Toilette she was gifted after her daughter, Rose, was born. “I loved the smell,” she says wistfully of the orange-blossom blend. “In the U.S., I noticed there is a fear sometimes about perfume,” she says. But in France? “In perfume we trust!”

This cultural affinity is standard in countries that have been producing good eau for centuries—adults, kids, everyone wears it. Lorraine Bolloré, the former beauty editor of French Vogue, remembers arriving in the delivery room enveloped in a rich cloud of bergamot-infused Guerlain L’Heure Bleu. Fragrance, she says, has always been “a special part of my children’s upbringing.” Fashion designer Maria Cornejo, meanwhile, wore a traditional cologne every Sunday while growing up in Santiago, Chile. “We would go to church, and my grandmother would put this cologne on us—it was very citrus-y, very clean,” she says. “It would be like wearing your Sunday best.” Celia Forner Venturi, the Valencia-born founder of beauty line AllEven, has similar memories of Alvarez Gómez Agua de Colonia Concentrada, a Spanish cologne made with lemon, rosemary, and lavender that her mother would comb through her hair. “It was a tradition passed down from mothers to daughters,” she says.

Venturi, who has two children and lives for part of the year in Rome, finds that many Italian moms mist their children’s clothing with perfume, and Roos says parents in France might also lightly spray the inside of a schoolbag. Such “discrete” rituals, she says, have become second-nature or everyday “gestures.”

In the era of clean beauty, though, many American mothers are extremely wary of every gesture and every ingredient applied to a baby’s skin. “Perfume” can be a catchall term used on a label for undisclosed ingredients. For that reason, Jessica Richards, the California-born founder of Shen Beauty in Brooklyn, says, “I think people here are more concerned about fragrance in general.” When I ask if she dabs scents on her two children, she responds emphatically, “Absolutely not!”

Similarly, New York City integrated health coach Daphne Javitch eschews all fragrances with her 4-month-old baby. “Mamas and babies communicate through natural scents, so I wouldn’t want to interrupt that.” Paula Mallis, a doula and founder of WMN Space in Los Angeles, only uses elixirs “naturally perfumed by their ingredients,” like Sundara Holistic baby massage oil and Muse Bath Apothecary’s baby mist, with her school-age daughter and 6-month-old son. Perfume, she says, just seems like something for “mature teens and adults.”

Personally, I tend to agree with Mallis. I gave up wearing fragrance, period, the minute I was pregnant with the first of my two girls, and I didn’t return to my usual assortment of green vetiver scents until very recently (my youngest is almost in kindergarten—it was a long break). I still haven’t put a drop on my kids’ skin, not even of Sale Gosse. Somehow, I feel more comfortable misting the subtle floral eau on my own wrists—my girls can wait.

And yet, I too believe scent is deeply tied to memory. While all mothers agree that the smell of a baby’s bare skin is “perfect,” as Javitch puts it, there is something to be said for capturing a moment in time with fragrance. Neroli after a bath, rose on the hem of a dress, lavender in the hair—one whiff can take you back to those fleeting childhood days. Cornejo, in fact, still buys the natural calendula oil she massaged on her son and daughter after baths—only now she uses it as her moisturizer. “It reminds me of them,” she says. “Now that they’re no longer little anymore.”