The Power of Scent: How Perfume, Memory & Mood Are Connected with Christina Loff

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[00:00:50] Christina Loff: Smell is such a cool sense because it’s been studied the least of all the senses, so it’s the most unknown. There is a connection between [00:01:00] smell and memory, and it’s like where it hits in the brain. There actually have been some studies done that the more you smell and exercise that s sense, the less likely you might be to get Alzheimer’s or some kind of memory loss.

[00:01:14] It’s a way of exercising your brain.

[00:01:19] Ellen Scanlon: Welcome to How To Do the Pot, the award-winning podcast that helps you feel confident about cannabis. I’m your host, Ellen Scanlon.

[00:01:35] For the past few weeks, we’ve been diving deep into menopause. I hope you’ve learned as much as I have because there’s a lot we should be talking about. In the first two parts of the menopause series, we covered a lot. We covered when menopause really starts. It can be a lot earlier than you might think sometimes as early as your late thirties.

[00:01:58] We talked about why most doctors [00:02:00] aren’t trained to treat it hormone therapy and estrogen, how cannabis is helping one in four women with symptoms and practical tips to help you feel like yourself Again, there’s more to come next week. Quick question. Are you reading my Substack newsletter yet? If you love listening to how to Do the Pot, I think you’ll really like the newsletter too.

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[00:03:02] In today’s show, we are gonna switch things up a bit and take a break from perimenopause and menopause. I wanna talk to you about one of the five s senses, your sense of smell. Why am I talking about scent on a cannabis podcast? Well, if you’ve ever walked down the street and immediately known that someone just enjoyed a joint, you probably get the connection.

[00:03:27] Think about the perfume you wore in high school. The smell of fresh cut grass or the ocean air on a warm summer day scent is very powerful. Humans can detect thousands of different smells and scent are closely tied to emotions, memory, and mood. There’s also a renaissance happening in fragrance right now.

[00:03:52] It’s a post covid thing. It’s a TikTok thing. It’s a real thing, and I am just the person to help us [00:04:00] figure it all out. My guest today is Christina lof, a writer based in San Francisco, who has turned her lifelong love of fragrance into the dry Down diaries, a popular Substack newsletter that celebrates all things, all factory.

[00:04:18] If you love Substack like I do, you probably have Christina to thank her. Day job is the head of lifestyle writer and creator partnerships at Substack. She has led the charge in Creator outreach and helped bring a diverse range of writers to the platform. I. With the dry down diaries, Christina’s goal is to make the world of fragrance feel exciting, inclusive, and deeply personal.

[00:04:46] Whether you’re a lifelong perfume lover or just starting to explore scent. If you’ve ever felt intimidated by the world of perfume or just struggled to find a scent that you really love, Christina [00:05:00] is here to help. And yes, there is a connection between perfume and cannabis. We’ll get into it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Christina l.

[00:05:22] So when we first met, I was reading your substack and, and sort of remembered that I was voted best smelling in my high school and I looked back. Uh, so I graduated from high school in 1995 and CK one was introduced in 1994. And I have always loved fashion. I’ve always loved to try like the newest. Newest thing, and so I think I was probably an early adopter and people recognized it as something that was connected to me as I’ve learned a little bit more about it, it feels like that really was kind of a watershed moment in fragrance.

[00:05:54] Christina Loff: Yeah. I was in high school in the nineties too, so I remember it. I did this whole post [00:06:00] when I first started the dry down diaries where I asked people what they wore, what their childhood teenage fragrances were, and CK one was by far and away the winner, like everybody that was their favorite. That was what they wore.

[00:06:10] It’s interesting because it was the first designer fragrance that was marketed towards men and women. Right? Like traditionally, and there’s still this thing with, with more like mainstream designer fragrance houses where they, it’s all marketing like men and women can wear whatever they want. It’s not, smell is not gendered.

[00:06:29] But for a brand like Calvin Klein, that huge brand to come out and say, this is, and they’re all of their ad campaign me, right? Like Kate Moss and they have male and female models together and all, it’s like very iconic and it’s a beautiful classic fragrance. Like it holds up.

[00:06:43] Ellen Scanlon: So in addition to being such an advocate for writers on Substack, you write your own, and it is called the dry down diary.

[00:06:52] So I looked this up because I had to figure it out, but maybe you can explain the genesis of the name.

[00:06:58] Christina Loff: Yeah, so there’s different [00:07:00] phases. Stages in when you put on a perfume and the dry down is the final stage of. Perfume. So it, some people say it’s like the truest form, like the truest stage, so it’s the the last scent on your skin and it’s kind of like what stays behind and it’s just, to me it’s very poetic.

[00:07:20] A lot of language for perfume to me is very poetic. I also do creative writing, and so there’s like this whole sort of like nostalgia, romanticism in the language that I love so much that’s used to describe perfume.

[00:07:35] Ellen Scanlon: It is very poetic and the hand gesture of sort of just like something like lovely, like the way a dancer would move their hand is kind of how I think about the physicality of a, of a beautiful perfume.

[00:07:46] Mm-hmm. Let’s talk a little bit about vocabulary. As a writer, I’m sure you think about words a lot. What are some of the words that a person who you know, may have bought perfume a long time [00:08:00] ago but has not participated in the Renaissance should know?

[00:08:04] Christina Loff: I will start by saying, you don’t need to know anything to enjoy perfume.

[00:08:08] And I think that’s been one of the things that has really held people back and it can feel intimidating like getting into wine. Like you need to know all this language and you can’t talk about it without knowing that, and you definitely don’t. You had asked about Raghead, which is like, I love that word.

[00:08:24] Raghead is basically somebody who’s obsessed with perfume. So somebody that’s super into fragrance probably collects. People love being called frat. I mean, I do at least, so it’s, it’s a good term. Another word I love is SiGe, which is a French word, S-I-L-L-A-G-E. And it is more of that like leaving behind.

[00:08:45] It’s the trail. You’re the scent that’s left behind when you like walk out of a room or when you hug somebody, the scent that’s left on their clothing. That’s a beautiful one. Then oftentimes you’ll hear, especially in marketing [00:09:00] copy, you’ll hear about like top notes, mid notes, or heart notes and base notes.

[00:09:05] It’s how most perfumes are constructed. So when a perfumer, which is also called a nose, I. Perfumers are called noses. When a perfumer is creating a scent, they’ll, they’ll think about those different layers, and basically what it means is a top note tends to be those molecules that burn off the quickest, but it’s gonna be the first thing you smell, and then the, it settles into the mid or the heart notes, and that’s white florals.

[00:09:31] Patchouli sometimes is in there certain. Ingredients are used there and then the base notes, and that’s what sticks around the longest, often impacting the dry down.

[00:09:40] Ellen Scanlon: I appreciate you saying that. You don’t have to know them to enjoy it. You know, it really does connect with me with sort of what I started learning when I got into the cannabis industry.

[00:09:49] I’m not a farmer. I, you know, I didn’t understand these things and, and still truly, it’s not my area of expertise, but there are people who are the nose and there’s a saying in [00:10:00] cannabis that your nose knows. And so if you ever have the chance to smell. Cannabis flour, regardless of what it may say on the categorization, sativa, indica, hybrid.

[00:10:09] Often it’s just connecting with your body in a way that feels right. And is that sort of how people connect with perfume?

[00:10:18] Christina Loff: There’s a thing in perfume where it’s like, if you smell it, it’s there. So what’s listed? The ingredients, the notes that are listed for a perfume that’s. Marketing because there’s many, many more ingredients usually than what they list.

[00:10:33] But it’s what the brand, the perfume house, the nose wants you to pick up. So by power of suggestion, right, if, if Bema is there, you’ll smell it. Jasmine is there, you’re gonna smell it. But I do this thing, it’s called Smell Club. Emma Vernon, she has a podcast called The Perfume Room. She does these smell clubs monthly and she picks a note and we all get samples of the same scent, and we talk about them and smell them.

[00:10:58] If you smell something, like [00:11:00] sometimes people will be like, oh, this smells like, you know, a baby doll’s head, or this smells like root beer. If you smell it, it’s there. So that kind of reminds me of what you’re saying and, and it is really about like, you get a feeling as soon as you smell something, and sometimes it’ll be a total turnoff, right?

[00:11:18] And it’s like, Ugh, I don’t like that. And then sometimes you smell it and it reminds you of something and it makes you feel comfortable. And so you should let your nose guide you.

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[00:12:21] I first started hearing about kind of sense coming back because we have some friends that have tween boys. Mm-hmm. And they were sort of leading the charge back into fragrance and I don’t even know, would they call it cologne or is it just fragrance? How did this renaissance begin and who are the most passionate consumers?

[00:12:41] Christina Loff: Fragrance really had a moment during covid, so that is when I think it really kind of blew up again and, and had this like momentum that has not slowed down. So it was both covid, everyone being inside wanting to like experience things they couldn’t experience. A lot of [00:13:00] people went very deep into fragrance during the Covid times, and then as a result we saw more and more social like influencers.

[00:13:10] Get into perfume. So perfume talk is what they call like TikTok, the perfume side of TikTok. And that really helped people get into fragrance. So now there’s a whole world of fragrance influencers, some of them who are now perfumers or have their own perfume houses and are putting out fragrances. I did an interview with Antonia who started, um, ministry of Scent.

[00:13:35] In San Francisco, which is an amazing fragrance store, and she was saying it was really covid. And then these influencers in the space who also made people realize it made it less intimidating. It may, it’s been this thing that feels a little gate kept. It was this entryway in. And the teenage boys into fragrance is fascinating to me.

[00:13:57] One of my favorite stories, they [00:14:00] like beast mode. Beast mode in fragrance is crazy, powerful, strong. Smell it through the walls, and that’s what these teenage boys tend to like. And so she had this kid that went into one of her stores. He was alone, but he had his credit cards, mom, his credit card, or selling his teenager.

[00:14:17] And he bought the strongest smelling fragrance and he knew what it was. I think he asked for it and he wore it to school the next day and they sent him home. They first, they made him change his clothes, but they could still smell it, and then they sent him home. But it’s really funny because we went to my boyfriend’s for Thanksgiving and we bought his mom and his sister and his niece perfume discovery kits, which is a great way to get into fragrance.

[00:14:43] And then we found out the biggest perfume fan was his nephew, who’s a senior in high school. So even more so than teenage girls. Uh, teenage boys are really, and they’re buying expensive designer fragrances.

[00:14:56] Ellen Scanlon: I feel like when people step into cannabis and then they finally get [00:15:00] themselves to a place where they’re like, okay, I am ready to go to a dispensary, then they have no idea what to buy very frequently, and that experience is uncomfortable.

[00:15:08] And I haven’t gone yet to the Ministry of Scent, but it’s on my list and, and I have a feeling that I’m not going to know any. Of the perfumes there. And how do you help people? Like are there certain kind of popular fragrances that you can use almost as a trail map? Like, okay, this one’s really popular, but I don’t like it, so maybe I should try this one.

[00:15:30] Like how, how does that work?

[00:15:32] Christina Loff: Yeah, the way we talk about fragrance is often in families. So you have florals, you have citrus, you have alek, you have woodsy. What I often tell people is to smell a range of them and how I like to tell people to get into fragrance. I have a whole post written how to get into fragrance, but um.

[00:15:56] Is through ordering discovery sets or even going into Ministry of [00:16:00] Scent, or, uh, if you have a perfume store where you live and asking for a discovery set that they recommend. A discovery set is several, I think it’s two mil, little samples of perfume, and it’s usually a good range of what that Perfume H House offers.

[00:16:15] And the nice thing about a discovery set is there’s usually a floral, there’s usually a woodsy, a gourmand, which is sweeter. And even just smelling each one of those will then help guide you like, okay, I hate the floral, it’s giving me a headache, but this one, which is like woodsy and makes me feel like I’m walking in the park or something, you know?

[00:16:35] That’s what I like. Then if you do go back to a store, whatever you can say to them, I. Okay. I like this one. It’s a woodsy center. You know, tell them they’ll probably know the name and then they can guide you. But honestly, it’s much like I think dispensaries where if you go in, the people that work there are there knowing that you might have zero knowledge and they’re making it.

[00:16:56] So that like you can just go up and say, I don’t even know what I [00:17:00] like, where should I start? And they’ll bring out a range, right? There’s like the kindest, most knowledgeable people who get, like, I get super excited getting people into this world and like giving them things to try. And so it’s super fun.

[00:17:13] I always tell people when you go into a a perfume store, just like be curious and don’t feel embarrassed about anything because nobody expects you to have any baseline of knowledge.

[00:17:23] Ellen Scanlon: It’s similar advice that I give for people going into dispensaries, although I do think that women have a harder time in dispensaries, and it may be just sort of because of history that women would feel more welcome in a perfume store.

[00:17:37] Christina Loff: And I think men have a harder time in a perfume store. And it’s been really interesting seeing more and more men at, you know, and we’re in San Francisco, so it’s a very, you know, it’s different than than other cities, but. Yeah, I think it’s, I think men are more embarrassed and shy, and even going in with my male friends, I could see that, whereas women feel more comfortable.

[00:17:56] Ellen Scanlon: Mm-hmm. You were the one that told me that cannabis [00:18:00] is often used as a sin. How is cannabis used and and what does it bring?

[00:18:05] Christina Loff: Yeah, so there’s this thing in. Perfumery called the Fantasy Accord. A good example is like the smell of latex balloons. Like that’s not a real smell that you can make, but you can bring molecules and and make something smell like that.

[00:18:22] A lot of times cannabis scents are very green. There’s a lot of different herbs that are used. Some woodiness, bergamot, like a lot of them start with like a citrus opening, and then they have like an earthy green. Vibe like Melanin. Getz has a cannabis scent. The strongest, most realistic cannabis perfume I have ever smelled is by a brand called Born to Stand Out.

[00:18:46] And it was so similar, which I don’t love one that’s like, so, so spot on. ’cause I don’t necessarily wanna walk around smelling like weed, but I like the greenness. Um, 1969 is another brand. They have Chronic [00:19:00] and Purple Haze, and then I, there’s. NATO is a brand that I love and they have a fragrance called Black Ano and they supposedly, they told me this when I bought it that there’s like some really rare cannabis oil that’s actually in it.

[00:19:15] I can’t detect it with my nose at all, but it’s like a thing with this fragrance. So

[00:19:20] Ellen Scanlon: Afgani is a very famous indico strain from the Hindu Kush mountains and is the base of a lot of strains that historically have been indica strains, which. Grow in difficult mountainous climates, and they’re the ones that bring a lot of the pain relieving benefits and sleep benefits.

[00:19:39] And so, uh, the names are, are kind of haze, tend to be sativa. They come from warm tropical kinds of climates. I did a, a whole show on, um, the secret history of cannabis strains, and it’s a. Same thing. They’re strained families and then people blend them to try and create different effects. And when I am smoking weed, I, I [00:20:00] like an Acapulco gold or like something that I love hot weather.

[00:20:03] I like the tropical kinds of like, make you feel up and light. And um, and then some people really prefer the stronger, sort of more sedative kinds of feelings. So, uh, the strained families are similar to the perfume families.

[00:20:27] Since my conversation with Christina, I’m happy to say that I have been making an effort to wear my perfume again. For most of my twenties and thirties, I wore a perfume called Gucci Envy. Sadly, it is discontinued, so I’m using it very sparingly, s spraying. It really does feel like a time machine. It’s so connected to my memories of that time in my life.

[00:20:53] One of the coolest things about Christina’s Substack the dry down diaries is that for paid [00:21:00] subscribers, she offers a customized fragrance quiz. Since I’m on the hunt for a new signature scent, it was really fun to take the quiz and get Christina’s thoughtful recommendations. If you’re looking for some fragrance inspiration, I highly recommend it.

[00:21:17] I’ll be featuring Christina on my substack newsletter in a few weeks, and we’ll talk more about the power of scent and how to find one that you love. If you’re in San Francisco, check out the Ministry of Scent in the Mission. I’ll add a link in the show notes. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend who loves perfume cannabis or just discovering something new.

[00:21:41] Next week we’ll get back to the topic of menopause and we’ll talk about sleep, hot flashes, weight gain, and how cannabis is helping with those frustrating symptoms. Thank you for listening and stay tuned.[00:22:00]

[00:22:00] For less, more information and past episodes, visit do the pot.com, and that’s also where you can sign up for my Substack newsletter if you like. How to do the pot. Please rate and review us on the podcast platform that you use for listening. It really helps more people find the show. Thank you to our producer Nick Patri.

[00:22:21] I’m Ellen Scanlon and stay tuned for more of how to do the Pot

[00:22:31] Support for How to Do the Pot comes from Pot Lee. Are you having trouble sleeping? Pot Lee’s dream. Goodnight shoes. Make it easy to relax. Fall asleep naturally, and wake up Feeling great. No. Next day. Grogginess Pot Lee is a women-led brand that knows a good night’s sleep, changes everything. Visit get pot hotly.com.

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