Bath & Body Works has a new scent out this season called Gardenia. As soon as I took my first sniff, I was hooked. My mom used to plant gardenias at our home where I grew up before my father died. It reminds me of my innocence.
Honeysuckle reminds me of arriving at my grandmother’s summer place every year for vacation. It makes me think of my mother’s noisy Volkswagen rabbit and how quiet the streets were because we had driven all night from Plattsburg to Oakdale and it was only 7 am and now mom was noising it up.
Recently I visited my college and entered one of the buildings. It smelled exactly the same as when I was there because of the food smells in the cafeteria where I had worked. I almost hallucinated my old boss.
There is a particular, sickly-sweet smell that comes with the anaesthetic gas that they use on little kids. I don’t know what to call it, but I know it when I smell it.
I was five or six and had my tonsils out. I was deathly afraid of needles, so I got gassed. The way they made me relax while I was passing out was to give me one of those little spinning carousel fishing games. The fish each have a little magnet in their mouth, and sit in holes in a blue plastic turntable. When they pass certain cogs inside the machine, their mouths pop open briefly. You use a magnet on a string, hanging from a short plastic “fishing rod”, to try to pull them out of the pond. They put the mask on my face, and told me to take a deeeeeep breath every time I caught a fish. ZONK.
So now the memory works two ways: first, if I smell that scent or something close to it (there’s a cleaning product that some restaurants use that smells close), I get woozy. Second, if I see a kid playing with one of the fish toys… I can smell the scent – and I get woozy!
Anais-Anais. Brings me back 20 years or so. That girl broke my heart.
Diesel fuel and road tar. Brings me back to when I was just a kid. My dad was an on site civil engineer. Sometimes he’d let me ride on the big buldozers and excavators with him at a construction site.
The smell at a dental office always brings me back to the teaching hospital where my mom worked as a dental surgery nurse. They brought me in one day from kindergarden for stitches because I fell and sliced open my chin. I remember the smell, bright lights and her standing over me while the doctor applied the stitches.
I cna’t quite describe it, but it’s a combination of cigarette smoke and that sort of musty smell that you find in attics and and old houses… That tends to bring me back to my grandmother’s old house. It was this great big, hundred-or-so year old house. The upkeep was just too much for her, and she really didn’t need a five-bedroom house, so she moved a few years ago. My god, I loved that house though.
The smell of regular old Coppertone sunblock reminds me of summers at our lake cottage. ditto for the smell of gasoline and lake water–it always takes me back to the beginning of summer, when we put the boat back in the water after wintering.
Grapefruit reminds me of Christmas, because we rarely bought it fresh when I was growing up, but friends would always send us a case from Florida at the holidays.
Diesel fumes from buses make me think of the excitement of arriving at the airport for a big trip.
Lynx Atlantis body spray. It never fails to remind me of a school trip to the south of France some 10 years ago. I don’t remember the details but I’m instantly reminded of the occasion.
And, naturally, it pissed it down the whole week we were there.
The coconut smell of tanning oil and a match lighting reminds me of summer weekends on the Jersey shore.
The smell of baby formula reminds me of the first few days my children were born, especially my oldest.
There is this certain sweet smell, indescribable, sort of honey and some cheap perfume, that I get a whiff of every now and then. It reminds me of a small teddy bear that my first boyfriend (13, 14?) gave me that had that smell.
There is also this sweet, cookie-like smell that I get a whiff of every now and then near or around bakeries, though it’s a very specific smell, more flour-like than sweet. It reminds me of my uncle that passed away several years ago. He worked for Sunshine Biscuits.
The smell of smoked fish reminds me of summers in the back yard of the house I grew up in. My father would go fishing every weekend, we needed an extra freezer just to store his catch, and he made a smokehouse out of an old refrigerator. The smell of the fish being smoked would fill the entire neighborhood.
How about the opposite of the OP, doe’s that count?
I hear the opening notes of a song from my teenage years, and I smell french fry grease.
The candy store / hangout I spent a few years in, served french fries, and had a juke box. The opening notes of ‘Bristol Stomp’, by the Dovels, triggers my smell sense. Weird.
And, no, it doesn’t work in reverse. 
The smell of Jergens Aloe & Lanolin lotion and aerosol Rave hairspray reminds me of my mom getting ready for work in the mornings.
The smell of Ralph Lauren Polo cologne reminds me of my dad, so much so that my husband has been forbidden to wear it.
Oddly, when I hear any song by Chicago, I remember the smell of strawberry poptarts. There was a time when my mother kept Chicago 16 in the tape deck of her car for weeks. I used to eat strawberry poptarts for breakfast as she drove me to school in the mornings, and that tape was playing constantly. I know, I’m weird.
donuts.
In high school, I walked to dance class. I walked right by a donut shop, and sometimes they’d be piping the dunut smell out. god, i loved that smell. I’d sometimes go out of my way just to pass the donut shop.
Dance-studio smell. They all seem to smell the same. Like sweat and air freshener, like air conditioning and dust and sometimes with a hint of winter air and a smell of wood mixed in. Every time I walk into a dance studio, no matter what it looks like, it feels like home.
there’s a certain scent… like a combination of baby powder and cookies… that sometimes comes through the air and it reminds me of my first dance intensive. They provided resistance bands for us, and the smelled of baby powder and baked goods.
hotel room sheets always remind me of my first hospital stay… laying there in the dark, frightened and crying… god, that was awful.
There is a certain smell of mashed potato and pumpkin (together) that evokes memories of my early years in a creche.
It’s amazing that even after 42 years the sense of smell can bring back such vivid times.
Eh.
Rosemary was my mother’s herb of choice. I also use it heavily, since it evokes her memory. The smell of a roasting turkey is always evocative, as well.
I used to love Clairol Herbal Essences body wash; then, about six years ago, I was hospitalized with a very serious infection and almost died. I was so sick that I didn’t know how sick I was. My husband brought me in my shower stuff from home so I could use it to wash up at the hospital. Ever since then, whenever I smell Herbal Essences body wash, I so clearly recall that. . .lost, loose-ends, surreal feeling of having a really high fever and being so sick.
Amazing how smells can bring back memories.
A few:
Anis = Christmas as my mother always made anis candy
Old Spice = my grandfather, who I think bought it by the case
Silly Putty = both for the Silly Putty I played with as a kid, and the smell of a new pen I got in grade school once with that same plastic odor
Lilac = seems to be popular on this thread, it was my grandmothers favorite flower and we had bushes all around the house and she often wore lilac perfume
Poppers = hey, I lived through the 70’s and 80’s and there are some wild sexual memories
in grad school during summer break i drove from sacto to chico. it had been close to 20 years since i had been in the area. somewhere past yuba city this smell wave hit. immediately took me back to summers between 1st-8th grade.
a sickly sweet rotting festering stench of drying prunes. it was harvest season and the prune processing plant in colusa just overwhelmed at least 100 sq miles for a few weeks. man that was a nasty smell memory i could have done without
When I was a kid–ten or twelve–I decided to “save” some potpourri for some reason, and put it in a Zip-Loc bag for “later.” (I was a weird kid.)
I put that potpourri in the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers, along with other “important stuff.”
I still have that chest of drawers and the Zip-Loc bag of potpourri is still in it, along with a bunch of other odds and ends from childhood, and I guess Zip-Loc really doesn’t “Lock” because the entire drawer smells like that potpourri.
So on the rare occasions I open that drawer, it smells like childhood.
Perhaps not as poetic as the rest of these memories, but the smell of tequila still makes me gag with the memory of one memorable evening spent heaving over the balcony of a girlfriend’s apartment in college seven years ago.
I can drink margaritas, but the smell of unadulterated cheap tequila makes me want to heave all over again.
My sister and I have the same ones, which isn’t all that unusual considering we grew up together. The only one I can remember is that of Ribena (blackcurrant flavoured drink). My sister made herself some the other day, on one side of the kitchen. She paused for a moment, then wandered over with it.
“Smell that. What does it remind you of?”
“Grandma’s house”… we used to drink it when visiting my dad’s mum - usually with breakfast, in her kitchen.
Oh, and another one - the smell you get when it rains somewhere it’s not rained for a long time, and everything’s really dry. I was on holiday in Arizona when I was 7 or 8, we were in a hire car, driving through parched landscape, and it started raining really heavily. The smell was overpowering, and when I smell it now it always takes me back.
I’ve got a food related one from early childhood too. If I ever smell ketchup mixed up with baked potato and rolled into a little ball, I’ll swear it smells exactly like it did when I was three and my brother or I–I don’t remember which–mixed a bit of baked potato with a bit of ketchup and rolled it into a little ball. I’ve never smelled this anywhere since.