As someone who has eczema, and whose boyfriend has asthma, fragrance is often the first ingredient we meet eyes with on packaging labels. A year prior, I was intrigued by Seoul’s abundance of perfume-making labs, where customers could walk in with their friends or partners to create their own fragrances, often scents that were personal to them or their loved one.

Of course, as I was single, I thought it would be fun to create a list of things I wanted to do with my future boyfriend. Make perfumes together for each other, buy each other flowers, duh.

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Then I met him.

“I’m kind of allergic to flowers,” I remember him clearly telling me.

A month after meeting him as friends, I told him I liked him. After a sleepless night, at the sliver of sunrise, he made his way to school for a club commitment, then came straight to my place with a massive bouquet of baby’s breath, pink carnations, and what looked like an idyllic crossover between a peony and a rose. A month after that, it was a bundle of vermilion red roses. Weeks after, it was blood-orange Gerbera daisies and baby’s breath he had carefully arranged because he’s a natural florist. How could he be good at something he once could barely touch?

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“We should make perfumes together, too,” he also had said.

“Aren’t you sensitive to scents?” We’d just gotten out of a LUSH store downtown, where he had to take a moment before going in to buy some hand soap.

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“You want to make perfumes together, though.”

“It’s not that important.”

“It must be important if it’s on your list.”

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Of course, I had found numerous ways to gift flowers to him without gifting actual flowers. Lego flowers, silk flowers. But he’d only gifted real flowers to me. I was afraid of suffocating someone with who I was, and more so what I loved. But he’d only ever remained curious of scents and flowers. He told me about his mother’s To Summer gift to him and named it as the only fragrance I can wear.

“I was worried,” he implied about his lack of scent. Maybe he wanted to be more, despite being enough. When I picture him, I smell jasmine, clove, vetiver, and bergamot. And if I was as vivid as he was describing, maybe there was something he understood that I couldn’t even see.

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As summer was coming to an end, he started to tell me more about his asthma. Despite my endless research and wondering why in the world he wasn’t bringing his inhaler around everywhere, his asthma to him seemed to be a distant emblem, a reminder, that once he had been unable to co-exist with what I considered our memory’s most beautiful skills. He’d been afraid of the exposure just as much as I was afraid of being suffocating.

I found out he’d been running his whole life to strengthen his lungs, been filling his memory with teas and earth and sunset orange and violet and red and coffee brown and inhaler blue and back to sky blue. Then he met me. He started arranging flowers to describe the colors of me he couldn’t fit into words. I no longer was afraid of being too much, because there was someone who expanded his own curiosity infinitely to harbor my likes and dislikes into his life.

I finally understood why every memory he had been describing was intoxicatingly vivid. Every molecule, despite its microscopic size, was cosmic to him. He’d been co-existing with our memory’s most beautiful skill at a catastrophic range I could never fathom, and in turn delivers somehow the most subtle, yet devastatingly brilliant stories of him.

These are the 5 scents for the ones who are sensitive to stronger fragrances. Please remember everyone has a different tolerance level to fragrance!

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