A Quick Essay on The Body Shop’s White Musk
I’m hanging out during a layover at the Detroit airport and having a smell memory. Church floor tiles, friend’s ambiently dark, Midwestern-feeling home where she melted butter and jam on tortillas in the microwave, and I couldn’t believe she was doing that texture-wise and flavor-wise. In front of me at the airport, a girl wearing all black and ‘90s-Disney-executive-color shoes is playing elegant scales on the white Yamaha in front of me. It smells like a mall fountain turned off — one of those perfect smells. The Body Shop’s White Musk might be another.
For some reason, my memory of experiences is really bad. Smells, like they’re supposed to do, bring back memories that I can usually barely access. Showered hair, Christian friend named Sara, brown leather jewelry, this White Musk smell in her room. Her dad looked fundamentalist, but he was just Methodist, and her mom was the church pastor. Sara’s evangelicalism calcified until one day she unfriended me on Facebook, and I lost the ability to check in on her and her kids named from Bible deep cuts. I wish writing things down didn’t make them sound so harsh sometimes.
I’m smelling the White Musk and catching more notes of it than I want to. The Body Shop released it in 1981 — a culmination of other white musks before it — but this one became its own cultural phenomenon. “There are very few girls who grew up in the late 1980s or in the 1990s who do not recall the smell of White Musk as the smell of school corridors and lilac bedrooms decked in chintz,” a perfume writer for Fragrantica says in a history of it. “The White Musk fragrance smelled approachable, friendly, non offensive, yet at the same time sensual, with a subtle come hither which did not imply sexuality, but rather a clean readiness for presenting the wearer to the world.”
There’s an angle of White Musk that’s Avon-esque grandma’s perfume — what nearly any perfume from before 1980 smelled like. But there’s also friend’s bedroom and wet, wavy showered hair. The few times we hung out in high school, I knew I wasn’t religious in the way Sara was, but she was homeschooled and that felt alternative. (A snippet from a 2007 Facebook message I wrote: “[…] congratulations on being homeschooled. That’s awesome!”)
I’m trying to piece together more memories from that time, like I wrote to her, “Even going to Walmart at 3 in the morning was fun…lol”. I also wrote, “When you come down to the island…we should get gyros. haha.” That same night, she messaged me just before midnight asking if I would “rate her purity on my profile so kyles stupid opinion doesn’t make me look like the devil.” God (speaking of) I wish I could remember the context for those conversations! She wondered if God was calling her crush to come on a missionary trip with her. In December 2007, I wrote vaguely to her about a crush I had: “It dawned on me earlier today that although guys are fickle, I’m very thankful for the strong network of girlfriends I have. Nothing can replace you guys!” She responded with:
“God truly gives us the gift of friendship, without which life would be unbearable. (that made me think.. . Jesus had no one to confide all his feelings too, no one who could really understand….how alone he must have felt!)”
Nostalgia can sometimes be for the birds, but I will say this, nothing will smell as pure and unknown and future-sex as White Musk. I’m 32, my heart’s racing, and the guitarist in the Detroit airport stopped playing his cover of “Brown Eyed Girl.” But! Someone’s sitting down at the piano again, a TikTok-attractive, athletic young couple playing “Heart And Soul” together. In some ways…same as it ever was. 🙂
