When I was in my early 20s, I ate a fig and my face swelled up like a balloon. My tongue itched, my lips looked like they had been injected with a Super-Soaker-sized syringe of filler, and the allergist I went to said, “I would avoid figs from here on out if I were you.” I took his words as gospel, fleeing cheese boards ornamented with fig jam, waving away fig tarts and bowls of fruit, giving tables laden with figs at farmers markets a wide berth. As an unexpected consequence, over time, I forgot what figs smelled like.
My husband frequently wears D.S. & Durga’s Debaser, a fragrance I love. To me, it smells fresh, leafy, and a bit like coconut, but until recently I wouldn’t have been able to name the dominant note. Then one day when we were in an Uber, our driver asked, “What is that amazing fig scent one of you is wearing?” My mind was blown.
I realized that a note I previously couldn’t identify in several of my favorite perfumes, including Dior’s Dioriviera and Liis’s In This World, was in fact fig, the forbidden fruit. I found the way my perfumes smelled positively heavenly: plush and juicy, redolent of warm summer days and plant-filled greenhouses. I’ve always recognized it as something luscious and botanical—but fig? Go figure. The more I sniffed around my fragrance collection, the more I found it: Fig is what makes the soft-musk Henry Rose London 1983 sing on my skin. It’s why Arquiste Parfumeur’s A Grove By the Sea transports me to a sunbaked island in the Adriatic. It’s the secret sauce in Stora Skuggan’s addictive Monkeyflower. And it provides the snapped-stem vibrance that offsets the opulent rose in Liberty London’s LBTY Zephirine. With this revelation, I went from fig phobic to fig fanatic. Now I can’t get enough of the stuff (of the olfactive variety, that is).
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