When I say I want to smell like a cigarette I mean a cigarette, god dammit.

Not tobacco. Not smoke. Cigarettes - nicotine and ash, good nights and bad decisions. Cigarette smoke, be it fresh and bitter or hours old and clinging to someone’s clothes, is one of my favourite smells in the world.

I sometimes imagine that olfactory heaven for me would be any cafe in France in the 1980’s. Fresh espresso and Poison and Giorgio Beverly Hills and ashy, throaty cigarette smoke. Can we not get a Maison Margiela Replica of that exact smell? I’d buy five bottles.

Contrary to what this Substack may have you believe, I don’t spend a lot of time interrogating why I love any particular smell. It’s good to note - like any art form, you need to understand and confront your own biases before analyzing perfume - but not as important to me as trying to understand and interpret the intent of the perfume itself. The message the perfumer is sending weighs more than preferences of the receiver, as it were.

The smell of cigarettes is different. When I tell people that I love this smell they are horrified.

Well, sometimes they’re horrified - ‘Miccaeli, please don’t tell me you smoke’ - but usually they laugh too. ‘You can’t be serious,’ they say, and I love to watch their bemused faces when I explain that I am very serious indeed.

‘I love it,’ I say, with the usual wide-eyed intensity I have when talking about perfume. ‘I love that dirty, ashy smell. I’d douse myself in it if I could. And I don’t mean tobacco, I mean cigarettes specifically. There’s something about it, you know?’

‘It’s disgusting,’ most of them will say - even the smokers! ‘It’s a terrible smell, and you can’t get rid of it.’ And then the same question every time, like the director of the universe had given them a script: ‘Miccaeli. Why the fuck would you want to smell like a cigarette?’

The first and easiest answer is just that I like it. I smell cigarette smoke and my brain says yes, good, more. I’m not a smoker and never have been, and I’ve liked the smell since I was a child. Some things are beyond comprehension; they speak to the howling animal in all of us.

A more complicated answer is that I seem to have a thing with poisonous smells. I love the smell of medicine and cyanide and petrol and bleach and turpentine. If it can kill me, I’m probably all about it. Meanwhile I hate the smell of bananas and I think fresh flowers are deeply overrated. This brain and this nose are in my head and I’m as mystified as you are.

There’s also the fact that a cigarette is - and I don’t want to hear your objections - a very sexy thing. There’s something about the tactility of it, the lighter and the placement of the hands. The curling smoke. The seamy social undercurrent of doing something bad, forbidden, and enjoying it so brazenly. You just don’t get that same sexiness from someone puffing on a vape.

But there’s comfort in the smell of cigarettes for me too. Memories of childhood Christmases and car rides with the smell baked into the walls. I smell this smell and it’s like my nervous system relaxes. I feel childlike in the sense that I feel problemless; cossetted; safe. This is a strange thing to feel when a stranger walks past you smelling of cigarettes on the bus.

It’s the lack of pretension you feel when you walk into an RSL club and the smell of cigarettes and stale beer surrounds you like a thumping hug from a boisterous man.

It’s the smell of the girls in school who came to class the day after a party and you could smell the smoke like a shibboleth; they knew things you didn’t, there was a place they had reached where you hadn’t gone yet.

Cigarette smoke is so ashy and thick and pungent that it can never be mistaken for anything else. It persists and it pervades. Though there’s some warped version of a plant in there, there’s nothing natural about the smell of a cigarette. It’s so human.

A cigarette, my brain offers up as the only complete answer I’ve got, is like Judas Iscariot.

If you were foolish enough to ask me which figure from the Bible I love the most, I would immediately say Judas Iscariot.

Let me try and explain this in the simplest way I can.

Interpretation of the story of Jesus can only take one of two paths: either he’s a historical figure around which grew the greatest religion the world has ever known or he truly is the son of god who is also god1 who came down to earth to die to redeem everyone’s sins.

If it’s the first path then you can’t think about the destiny of it all. There is no redemption, there is no Christ. There’s only a little cult of personality in Judea around a man who thinks that pacifism, and love, can save his people from the crushing boot of Empire.

Would you believe that? When the followers start to multiply and this man who was your friend starts calling himself the Messiah - would you believe that?

When you’re hungry and you’re scared and the freedom of everyone around you is on the line - would you be strong enough to fight that?

If it’s the second... well, if it’s the second path where Jesus must die then there is no free will. There’s only a god making sure events happen in exactly the way they need.

And if that’s the case, then none of it can happen without Judas. There is no Christianity without Judas. The story doesn’t happen without human weakness - human weakness that echoes as importantly as the zealotry of Peter and Paul.

There are no stories of good people doing good things. Stories need conflict. The human heart provides.

So there’s Judas. Sitting at the heart of this story, the most famous story ever told, and yet mostly forgotten. Living only as another word for betrayer. Dante put him frozen and burning in the mouth of the devil. “The soul that suffers most is Judas Iscariot.”

The most infamous person in history.

Just a man.

A man who made bad choices. Who acted out of anger, or greed, or fear. It is easy to make Judas a villain (and convenient, too, if you’re planning on converting the Romans and need to soft relaunch Pontius Pilate) - so easy that we should always question it.

The unsolvable problem at the heart of Christianity is that the Chalcedonian creed that Christ was both human and divine makes him too distant and foreign to us. The viscerality of his death is an attempt to bridge that gap but it never quite reaches home.

The riposte to this over two thousand years of blood and faith have been saints and angels and popes and holy kings, what we would have called demigods in older, more diffuse religions. Christ in unreachable; a saint that was your age or your gender or who spoke your language is a beating red thread connecting you to the divine.

Judas is not a saint. Judas, really, isn’t much of anything - a footnote, a scapegoat, the renegade apostle. When artists paint The Last Supper he’s always turning the other way; in stained glass he is the only apostle to be given a black halo. Along with Christ, he’s the only one who stands out.

He’s up there, I always think, to show how wretched a man can become.

When I look at Judas I see something else. I see, painted in glass in the greatest story ever told, proof that the worst decisions that a human can make can echo through history. I see human frailty and weakness and shame and betrayal, that we are the only species that will make a friend or put their faith in a stranger and also the only species that would throw that all away for some silver.

The story is either history, and he made a choice that echoes through eternity; or it’s mythology, there was no free will, and Judas is the sacrifice a god made to cement the divine. I think I’m going to think about that for the rest of my life.

Choices and flaws and ugly little weaknesses. These things are uncomfortable and dark and churn restlessly in the back of your mind. They as much a part of us as the holy and the good.

Maybe more. Maybe even more.

Life is not about perfection. Perfection, like death, is still. Living is not easy. Every day we wake up and we buckle under the pressure, the terrible pressure, of being alive. Life, in a way, is defined by flaws.

Life is movement and movement means tripping. Mistakes that fill your lungs like furls of smoke. You can only become a saint after you’ve died. Perfection is still. Death is the end of choice. You can wake up tomorrow and make any choice you want, including and especially bad ones, because you are alive.

And I guess that’s what the smell of cigarettes make feel. I love people. I love their mess and their flaws and the foolish, selfish things we do to one another and to ourselves.

I love that our brains know that there’s no benefit from a cigarette or a nicotine addiction, and we do it anyway. It has no benefit; it’s a small pleasure that in the end is only going to hurt. But every day we wake up and there’s that pressure of living in our bones. And we do it anyway.

A cigarette is a man-made monstrosity. You would think it would be easier to recreate olfactively. But in my long, long search for a really great cigarette perfume I have only found a handful. I believe that one of the most crucial tenets of good perfumery is a touch of ugliness amidst all the beauty. Something to refract from; something to contrast with. A cigarette perfume is the opposite - all ugliness, the beauty pushing relentlessly forward with grim determination.

I’m still waiting to find my perfect, flawed, ugly little cigarette perfume. But until then if you want to smell a pretty great one there’s Jasmine et Cigarette, a perfume I own and wear often. It captures perfectly the smell of day-old cigarette ash through some kind of magical combination of a filthy little jasmine and a nasty, sour little tobacco-cumin-hay accord that I would inject into my veins if I could.

It’s the smell of a washed up rockstar; of cleaning up the morning after a house party that trashed your living room and gave you an ugly hangover; of the tangled hair and dried mascara tracks that accompany a stiff-limbed walk home after a one-night stand.

I don’t ever feel a desire to smell pretty. But sometimes I feel the need to smell like I’ve made some bad decisions. Because that’s what makes a smell interesting - and that’s what makes a person interesting, too.

Some days I wake up and I just want to smell like Jasmine et Cigarette. There’s a hundred thousand choices in my day and I could make the wrong one at any moment. And when I do, I get to fix it. Or do it again. Another choice in front of me like a road to eternity. I get to keep going.

God, what a privilege.

The sun is shining and I smell like I’m alive. ▧