Elena Cvjetkovic – ‘The Plum Girl’ as a young girl growing up in Bosnia age 7

I was born in a small town in central Bosnia. Well before time, underweight, feet first. First photos of me show an extremely skinny, wrinkled, jaundice-yellow face with a prominent thin, long nose. I lived, the nose didn’t change that much.

 Plitvice Lakes in Croatia by Elena Cvjetkovic©

My parents were on a mission called “connecting to Nature with all senses“, making my first olfactory memories reach far behind garden flowers. I sniffed crushed bugs on the windshield of our car, molehills, brown forest frogs, porcini and pheasant poop among other things.

The Adriatic Sea by Elena Cvjetkovic© Croatia

Summertimes meant weeks spent at the coast of Adriatic Sea, learning to pick Mediterranean herbs, taking out pine tar stuck in my hair, catching crickets, licking sea salt found on rocks, and memorizing 1001 different fragrant notes of the Sea.

Yves Saint Laurent Opium ad featuring Jerry Hall, photo by Helmut Newton, 1977

When I was sixteen I received a present from my parents – my first bottle of perfume. Later on, new bottles came 2-3 times a year. I was wearing YSL Rive Gauche Opium and Lancôme Magie Noire in the 1970s and Guerlain’s Nahema was the first fragrance I purchased on my own in 1980. I traveled a lot, studied hard, and ’80s were just as intense as perfumes from that decade.

I remember well the day I held a bottle of the newly released Lancome Tresor in my hands in 1991. That Tresor bottle, and what was left of any other perfume I had, lasted me for five years. 1.916 days and one night to be exact, from Easter of 1991 to the New Year’s Eve in 1995, since the beginning until the end of the brutal Independence War in Croatia.

You see, when you are well aware that in any given moment you might lose all your material possessions and probably your life as well, priorities shift.

Wearing perfume during nights spent in underground shelters wasn’t really an option. Buying perfume? An inappropriate and unaffordable luxury.  Contents of my purse were limited to survival basics: a bottle of water, one chocolate bar, a small box of crackers, ID and the health insurance card, a small transistor, and yes, red lipstick. One little thing to preserve sanity. This is what covers your needs in case of a general danger or air-strike alert and subsequent stay in moldy old underground shelters, smelling of breath, hair, skin, and sweat of a bunch of strangers stuck together for who knows how long.

I’ve learned what fear, uncertainty, shock, destruction and pain smell like. And yet, I worked, traveled, functioned, lived and loved. You adapt. La vita e bella…

Courtesy of Comme des Garcons

My fragrant awakening took place in London, in early 1995.I was on a business trip and remember having exactly 20 pounds in my pocket (a fortune!) when I headed toward London City. It felt so strange to walk those streets again after almost five years, so surreal. The City hasn’t changed. I have. The aimless walk took me to a place I found soothing: a perfumery. There it was. The first Comme des Garcons, EDP 1994 release! It took me a couple of minutes to gather the courage to enter the store, more to ask to test the perfume. I knew I couldn’t afford it. It happened: I had never smelled anything like it.

Comme des Garcons, EDP felt like a safety net: warm, cozy, filled with different spices, mouthwatering, sensual and elegant at the same time. It was everything I didn’t feel like anymore, everything I remembered being, and everything I wanted to be again.

I left holding tightly a tester in my hand. Never in my life have I appreciated a tester more than at that moment.

I walked out feeling the utter joy of living flooding my mind, body, and soul, sat at the curb on a busy London street, tears running down my face. I haven’t cried since early 1991, not once in nearly five years. Now I couldn’t stop crying, sniffing my wrists every now and then. Tears of joy, tears of relief. I finally felt alive again.

I never purchased Comme des Garcons, EDP, not even later, when I could. However memorable this moment was – I didn’t want to relive it. I moved on, continued to travel, and explore the world of niche perfumes with a hungry nose and an insatiable desire to learn more.

I collect olfactory experiences.

No one can take that away from me.

This is why I started to write niche perfume reviews two years ago, to try to convey the deepest and finest emotions a perfume can elicit: to share in the name of life, love, beauty, and art!

Elena Cvjetkovic with Mark Buxton at Esxence 2019

I met with Mark Buxton at Esxence Milano this year. He knows nothing about my fragrant awakening, but I couldn’t resist hugging him. 24 years later.

–Elena Cvjetkovic, The Plum Girl

Elena’s 2019 Perfumed Plume pen and 2019 Esxence press badge

 Editor’s Note:  Elena is the 2019 Perfumed Plume Awardee for Best Instapost.  She  has visited the US since 1982 several times… but we will wait for her book to read more- Michelyn Camen, Editor-in-Chief

Elena’s Fragrant Awakening is the most poignant that has been written in our series since its inception by Tama Blough, who passed January 9, 2015 

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