Long before I knew Kate Waterhouse as a fashion editor and one of Australia’s most observed style figures, I sent her mother a set of Penhaligon’s fragrances. I was the Australian distributor at the time for many of the niche fragrance houses that have shot to global fame and Penhaligon’s seemed a perfect fit for an equally iconic, Gai Waterhouse. Gai loved them, and told me so. Over twenty years later Kate is on my podcast, telling me her earliest memory of scent is her mother’s perfume bottles laid out on the dressing table. Full circle, in a way only the fragrance stories tend to be.
This was the quietest of the conversations I had in this series, and also the most personal. Kate has spent her professional life thinking about clothes. What I wanted to draw out was the layer that comes underneath them, and the way scent works on a woman across decades. We started where she started. Saint Laurent Opium.
The bottle she took in for show and tell
Kate can’t remember much from preschool but she does remember taking her mother’s perfume bottle in for show and tell. It was Saint Laurent Opium. It had the reddish lacquer body and the long black silk tassel that defined the late seventies perfume bottle as an object. She was perhaps four years old and entirely certain that this was the most extraordinary thing in her family’s house. She took it to school, proudly held it up for the class, and she brought it back home.
“I can’t imagine my girls ever now going, this is mum’s bottle of perfume for show and tell. But it was. It really, as a young girl, had a big impact on me.”
Kate Waterhouse
This was the era of blockbuster fragrances. Opium, Poison, White Diamonds, Obsession, Shalimar. Singular bottles you smelled across a room and instantly identified. I wore this same Opium to my year nine school formal, partly because my own very glamorous mother wore it, partly because at fourteen I was certain I was ready to project sophistication. My date, Justin, in retrospect, was probably terrified by the wall of scent, and as far as I can recall did not complement my scent choice that night. But the fragrance you watch your mother apply is the fragrance you reach for when you are trying on adulthood for the first time. That is how this works.
I’ve written about my own first encounter with Shalimar, in a piece on perfumery as high art.
A different fragrance for every decade
There is a fragrance for every chapter of Kate’s life, and they unspool in the same order they were lived. Opium on her mother, in the bathroom of her childhood. Calvin Klein CK1 and Elizabeth Arden Sunflower in her teenage years, when getting ready meant a sprits of perfume rather than a face of makeup. Balenciaga in her late twenties and early thirties, anchored to her wedding day. The elegance of Jo Malone for daytime now and sensual Giorgio Armani Sì for evenings. Kate reaches for Chloé or Gucci fragrances, for a daytime event that wants something between the two.
What is missing from this list is the singular signature scent. Kate used to be a one-perfume woman in the way her mother was and now she no longer is. She moves through her drawer in the morning the way another woman might move through a closet, choosing for the role of the day. Sometimes the answer is no perfume at all, because the body wash and the cream have already finished the work she needs the fragrance to do. Grand View Research calls this the scent wardrobe and identifies it as one of the defining behaviours of the fragrance moment we are in, but what Kate is describing is the next step beyond it. A mood wardrobe. Not a perfume for every outfit, but a perfume for every version of herself she needs to walk into the day as.
How children changed her relationship with scent
The shift Kate describes most precisely is the one that arrived with motherhood. Pre-children, she could spray on whatever she felt like and barely notice it through the day. Post-children, she became, in her own description, almost hypersensitive to her own perfume. She had to really love a fragrance to be able to live inside it for the next eight hours. Anything she did not love, she could now smell on herself with discomfort.
This is one of the least discussed and most universal experiences in the fragrance lives of women. The skin biome that allows a perfume to bloom or fall flat is in constant motion. Pregnancy rearranges it, breastfeeding rearranges it, and perimenopause rearranges it again. So does the menstrual cycle, in much subtler ways, every twenty-eight days. Fragrances that were once seamless on a wearer’s skin can become uncooperative for reasons that have nothing to do with the perfumer.
On the flip side, something I offered to Kate during the conversation, is that fragrances that once smelled wrong on a body can become beautiful on it later. The perfume that did not work in someone’s thirties may be the one that works in their forties, on a body that has settled into a different chemistry. Nothing is permanent in scent because nothing is permanent in the skin underneath it.
Layering through the whole house, not just the bottle
For Kate, the fragrance ritual is not actually concentrated in the perfume bottle. It begins in the laundry: she chooses her fabric softener and her washing powder on the basis of how the clothes will smell when she puts them on, and chooses her body wash and her shampoo the same way. The candles burning in the living room are part of the same layered composition, so is the scent her children pull up to their faces in their school uniforms during the day.
“I try to always use the same fabric softener. I want my children to have that smell of their uniforms and their sheets, that smell of home. Every time they get into bed, it has a beautiful smell, and is what they can call home.” – Kate Waterhouse
This is one of the most overlooked truths in fragrance and the concept of layering. By the time a perfume goes on the pulse points, the wearer has already composed eight or ten quieter scent decisions through the day. The conditioner she rinsed out an hour earlier, the body wash before that, the candle on the kitchen bench and the sheets she slept on. The perfume is the loudest note but not the only one, and the women whose scent feels most distinctly theirs are almost always the ones who have made every one of those quieter choices on purpose.
My daughter identifies by best friend by her signature scent. It’s a combination that is so uniquely hers and runs through her home, car, clothes and aura. It’s an olfactive imprint that only layering and skin chemistry can create, and it feels like familiarity, joy and safety all at once.
The ritual she is now beginning with her own daughters
Kate’s daughters are still young and not yet consumed by the gravity of fragrance and getting ready. But they have started to ask as they watch their mother at her dressing table. They notice the bottles and want to spray on a little of what she has on. This is the moment Kate herself recognises in her own childhood, and she is aware of its importance.
I told her my own version. My grandmother let me play with everything on her dressing table and I know by heart the scent of Lancome lipsticks, Estee Lauder face powders, Aromatics Elixir by Clinique and Femme by Rochas perfumes, that were her scent. My mother, glamorous and impossibly beautiful, wore Diorella to my father’s Eau Sauvage, and these two perfumes are forever, in my memory, the smell of my parents in love. My father bought me a bottle of Chloé by Karl Lagerfeld when I was five and it was a gift that etched an imprint of my future self into my subconscious, one that literally changed my life. Years later he added a bottle of Miss Dior to the set, a triptych to my parent’s Dior family. I still wear all of them including sometimes the scents of my parents, aunties and grandmother. The vintage bottles I hunt down on eBay now are the ones that were on those shelves.
Floral, sunny, unapologetically light
Asked at the end of the conversation to describe her own aura, Kate hesitates only briefly. Sunny. Bright. Floral. She is drawn to the sweeter end of the white florals and away from anything too punchy. I read that aura back to her in real time as hyperfeminine, and she laughed and agreed. The niche fragrance world has, in the past decade, produced a lot of complicated, intellectual and in a way complicated brooding work. So it’s refreshing for an elegant woman like Kate, to walk into a room smelling, unapologetically, of light.
This is what stays after the conversation ends. Fragrance as the longest sentence a woman writes about herself, in a language she inherits from her mother and passes on to her daughters, one bottle at a time.
Listen to the full conversation with Kate Waterhouse on the Ageless Radiance Club podcast
