When Lolita Lempicka launched its perfume, in 1997, I was at the ripe age of too young to know what being a woman was about but wanting badly to get in on the secret. It was the year of Shania Twain’s anthem “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” Femininity to me was equal parts riot grrrl and girl power. And Lolita Lempicka perfume hit me right at my yearning, confused heart.
In the pages of Seventeen and YM magazines, Lolita Lempicka looked like a fairy tale. It was the creation of a dreamy French fashion designer who chose her first name from the Nabokov heroine and paired it with the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Everything about it was as far removed from my suburban reality as possible.
I was 11, too ridiculously young to parse the complexities of femininity and its conflicting messages. I understood the key tenet of “less is more” as less makeup, less talking, less body mass, less complaining. But no matter how much I tried to be less, I never experienced the payoff of “more,” whatever that was supposed to be. And then I smelled Lolita Lempicka and all its tantalizing excess. It was definitely “more is more.”
Lolita Lempicka was an indulgence bordering on bellyache. It smelled the way I’d imagine Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge to smell: a powdery cloud of anise, cherry, violet, and tonka bean that could be detected from a block away. Here come the girls, it announced to anyone within three yards. It was intoxicating in the seductive-sickening way that gasoline is for some. The fact that it repulsed the boys in my grade was another quality in its favor.
The bottle—lavender and apple-shaped with a golden stem for a cap—was like a cheeky reference to Adam and Eve, if Eve was a teenager with an active imagination, which she may well have been.
Most people familiar with the scent have a clear memory of stealing spritzes from their mother’s or cool older sister’s supply. The sweet, velvety fragrance clung to your hair and clothes. It made me feel poised and tall, like wearing high heels without the wobbly discomfort.
Frag heads have kept track of Lolita Lempicka’s many reformulations, some of which were a result of regulatory changes and some from different owners over the years. Fans voice sharp opinions about which blends are superior or as close to the original as possible. One commenter on Fragrantica called the 2017 Mon Premier a “disgustingly childish cherry pop.” The formula was altered again and renamed Le Parfum in 2021 to make it vegan. I purchased a bottle of Mon Premier a few years ago and found it maintains its candy-sweet drydown, whereas Le Parfum has a more modern, powdery, musky effect.
But memory doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective. One whiff of Le Parfum lights up whatever fold of my brain stores the memory of collaging magazines in my room on a Friday night. I can also picture a co-worker at my cater-waiter job in high school who doused herself with the scent because it brought her more tips. I can conjure up the feeling of sitting in a friend’s Volkswagen Jetta as we sprayed it to mask the odor of cigarette smoke.
When I inhale it today, it almost works as a form of olfactive reparenting. I’ve moved past the fairy garden of Lolita Lempicka, but it’s a comforting memory to revisit.
Sable Yong is a beauty writer and host of the podcast Smell Ya Later. She writes the Hard Feelings newsletter. Her essay collection, Die Hot with a Vengeance, will be published on July 9 by HarperCollins