Plutonic Rainbows

Open a drawer you haven't touched in twenty years and find a bottle of perfume. Spray it. What happens next is not nostalgia.

Nostalgia is warm. It aches pleasantly. It knows it's looking backward. What this does is different — it collapses the distance. For a few seconds the earlier time doesn't feel remembered. It feels reinstated. The room, the light, the particular quality of a morning reassemble themselves around you with an authority that has nothing to do with conscious recall.

This is because scent bypasses the thalamus entirely. Every other sense — vision, hearing, touch — routes through that relay station before reaching the cortex. Smell doesn't. It travels from the olfactory bulb directly to the amygdala and hippocampus — emotion and memory, two synapses from the nose. Rachel Herz's neuroimaging work at Brown confirmed what Proust described in 1913: odour-evoked memories are not more accurate than other memories. They are more emotionally immersive. The affect arrives before the content. You feel the past before you can name it.

Freud had a word for this kind of return. He called it the Unheimlich — the uncanny. His 1919 essay rejected the idea that uncanniness comes from encountering the unknown. The opposite. It comes from re-encountering the known — something familiar that was hidden and has now resurfaced. Schelling's definition, which Freud adopted: "Everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light."

A sealed bottle fits this structure precisely. The fragrance existed quietly, materially intact, while the world shifted and your identity accumulated decades of alteration. When re-encountered, it produces a rupture in temporal continuity. Not because the scent has changed — it hasn't. Because you have.

Though even this isn't quite right. The fragrance has changed too — oxidised, its top notes degraded, the composition shifted by decades of slow chemistry. But its rate of change is so much slower than yours that it produces an illusion of permanence. The bottle seems to promise fixity. You cannot reciprocate. Human identity is processual, not static — you were never meant to remain identical to the person who closed that drawer. The discomfort is that the object seems to have managed what you could not.

This is where it diverges from hauntology. Mark Fisher's framework mourns lost futures — the feeling that the present has failed to deliver what the past once promised. That's a cultural displacement, a collective grief. What happens with a rediscovered fragrance is more personal and more disturbing. The object appears stable, almost indifferent to the years. You, by contrast, have aged, shifted, rebuilt. The bottle seems to have remained outside history while you were inside it. That imbalance creates a subtle ontological disturbance — the sense that time has behaved unevenly.

I've written before about objects that outlive the worlds that made sense of them. But this is narrower. This isn't about cultural context vanishing. It's about temporal suspension — the discovery that something of your own past survived unchanged in a drawer while you moved through years that changed you entirely. The eeriness isn't that the world has moved on. It's that the bottle didn't.

What sharpens this further is the sense that earlier versions of yourself are gone. Not just aged past — gone. That person, with his specific hopes, naivety, emotional intensity, blind spots, cannot be re-entered. You can remember him. You cannot inhabit him again. This is a common fear, though people rarely articulate it directly. It is not simply ageing that unsettles. It is irretrievability.

An old fragrance intensifies this because scent does something memory alone cannot: it reconstructs atmosphere. For a moment, the emotional climate of that earlier self flickers back into the room. Then it fades. The contrast between temporary reactivation and permanent loss sharpens the awareness that identity is not cumulative in a simple way. It is layered, and layers become inaccessible.

Though it is not accurate to say those versions are gone in an absolute sense. They are no longer active configurations of your nervous system, but they are structurally embedded in who you are now. Every preference, fear, aesthetic sensibility you carry is downstream from those earlier states. The younger self is not erased — he is metabolised. You no longer have access to the raw form, but his architecture persists.

The distress arises because memory gives you a partial reconstruction, not full embodiment. That gap feels like standing outside a locked room that once was your whole world. And if the feeling carries intensity beyond momentary unease — if it feels existential rather than reflective — it may be tied less to memory and more to mortality awareness. The two are closely linked.

There is another way to read the encounter. The bottle is static matter. You are adaptive consciousness. Identity is not a sequence of discarded selves — it is a continuous biological process that updates while retaining traces. The earlier version feels lost because you cannot be him again. But the fact that you can recognise him at all means he is still structurally present. The fact that you have changed — aged, accumulated, rebuilt — is not loss alone. It is evidence of having lived.

But that knowledge doesn't dissolve the feeling. Something intimate has persisted without your permission, and its persistence exposes, quietly and without malice, the fact that you are not the person it remembers.

Sources:

• Neuroimaging Evidence for the Emotional Potency of Odor-Evoked Memory — Neuropsychologia

• Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) — Sigmund Freud, 1919

• Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures — Mark Fisher, 2014

I ran the numbers last week. Not because I wanted to, but because a thought that had been circling for months finally landed and demanded arithmetic. The question was simple: how much did I spend on fragrance in 2025?

The answer was £2,573.

I sat with that figure for a while. Individual purchases had felt modest — a bottle here, a sample set there, the occasional limited release that seemed unreasonable to miss. Each transaction was small enough to file under "affordable pleasure." Collectively, over twelve months, they added up to something I hadn't authorised in any conscious way. Roughly £215 a month, distributed so evenly across the year that no single month looked alarming.

Here is what made the number sting. The Exposure 2510 integrated amplifier I wrote about recently retails for approximately £2,100. A Chord ClearwayX ARAY speaker cable to connect it properly costs £155. Together: £2,255. I spent £318 more than that on fragrance — a collection of volatile compounds designed, by definition, to evaporate.

The contrast isn't about one category being more worthy than the other. I've written about fragrance with genuine enthusiasm and I stand by most of those purchases as individual decisions. The problem is the pattern. Diffuse spending, distributed across months in amounts too small to trigger scrutiny, accumulating into a total that could have funded something durable and transformative. The amplifier would sit on my shelf for a decade or more, improving every listening session. The fragrances are half- used bottles in a drawer, some of which I've already forgotten I own.

Behavioural economists have a term for this: the aggregation problem. The tendency to evaluate purchases individually rather than as a portfolio. Each £40 bottle passes the "can I afford this?" test. The aggregate fails the "is this how I want to allocate resources?" test. I never asked the second question because I never saw the total. The spending was incremental, and incrementalism is invisible by design.

What makes this particularly pointed is that I don't regret the Cambridge Audio CXN I bought the year before. That purchase was deliberate, researched, and has delivered daily utility ever since. It was a focused allocation toward a defined goal. The fragrance spending was the opposite — undirected, reactive, driven by novelty rather than need. One approach left me with something I use every day. The other left me with a number that made me wince.

So I'm making a correction. No fragrance purchases until November. No full bottles, no samples, no limited edition exceptions. The money that would have gone there gets redirected into a dedicated fund. Nine months at £215 gives me roughly £1,935. Ten months reaches £2,150. Enough for the amplifier without strain, without borrowing, without the quiet self-reproach that follows impulsive spending.

The environmental controls matter as much as the rule itself. I've unsubscribed from fragrance marketing emails. I've stopped browsing retailer sites during idle moments. Saved carts and wishlists have been cleared. These aren't dramatic gestures — they're the removal of triggers. Most discretionary spending doesn't begin with a decision. It begins with exposure. An email lands, a page loads, a new release appears in a feed. The desire follows the stimulus, not the other way around. Cutting the stimulus is easier than resisting the desire.

I'm aware this reads like a resolution, and resolutions have a poor track record. But I think the difference here is specificity. I'm not vowing to "spend less" or "be more mindful." I'm redirecting a quantified amount toward a defined object on a fixed timeline. The success metric isn't discipline in the abstract — it's whether, come November, I can make a purchase decision calmly, from a position of having already funded it, without urgency or compensation psychology.

The shift I'm after is structural. From impulse accumulation to deliberate, single-track funding of something that will last. From a drawer of diminishing bottles to a piece of engineering that will outlive everything in it.

Some things are meant to evaporate. Budgets shouldn't be one of them.