Scents of Place: Perfume as a Companion on the Journey

The ad for the new Jo Malone, English Oak fragrances made me buy it. 
I'm a sucker for an image that looks like it came out the 1980s film, "Legend," albeit without Tom Cruise and Tim Curry.

The ad made me think of English forests, like Sherwood (a real place, BTW). Where I actually met the real Sheriff of Nottingham (there is one BTW). I also learned to shoot arrows in Sherwood Forest and climbed inside an ancient oak much like the one in the ad.

Fragrances and journeys seem to have a natural affinity for each other. I remember a cruise whenever I open a bottle of Samsara. I was wearing the original (not the reformulated) version but the scent brings me back to ports of call like Pompeii and Mykonos.
My trick is this: I buy a bottle of perfume or cologne that is new to me--not something I would, perhaps, choose as a signature scent or want to wear forever. Then I wear it on the journey and afterwards, keep it sealed as a living scent memory of that journey. If I want my deep, reptilian scent-memory to bring me back to Morocco, let's say, I open up a bottle of Etro's Palais Jamais and I'm back in Fez.  Or I bring back the feel of the blue waters of Croatia with a sniff of Dior's Dune.  

​There's a phrase in perfumery: silage. Silage is the length of time a perfume has to linger and exude from the body. Pairing perfume to a journey extends that's journey's silage--even if just for a finite and fragile moment in time.

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The Arabian Nights sumptuousness of Sofitel's Palais Jamais, in Fez, Morocco.