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My grandfather loved to smoke cigars. And by that, I mean he loved to smoke cigars. For him, cigar smoking wasn’t just a celebratory puff or two at a wedding or a graduation. It was a daily ritual, marked by the silver guillotine cutter he kept in his Polo shirt pocket, the cigar butt in a constant balancing act on his lower lip.
My memories of him revolve around this warm scent. One of my earliest is of sitting next to him on my parents’ back porch in Colorado, each of us in a patio chair, enjoying one of those endless, periwinkle-soaked summer nights together, with me reading a book and him puffing plumes of aromatic smoke in the direction away from me. He would wave the smoke with his cigar-free hand if the wind carried it too close to my delicate lungs. The air smelled like smoke, leather, wood, July, and yellowing book pages, and I loved every second of it.
In his prime, he was a patron at a local cigar shop, where he’d go nearly every day. He’d sit in tall armchairs and shoot the breeze with the other men who, like him, were happier with a cigar in hand. When he picked me up from school in his sky-blue Oldsmobile, we’d often swing past the shop, where I was allowed in the front but never the back; unlike the outdoors, where my grandfather could wave smoke away from me, the back of the cigar shop had smoke woven into its atmosphere, hanging in the air like a velvet curtain.
The author and her grandfather.
When I was there, the shop owner treated me like royalty—I got used to being called “the famous Katie” and offered chocolate or a lollipop whenever I strode through the door. My grandfather often cautioned me against ever smoking cigars myself, but he couldn’t help but teach me about them. He’d bring me up to the counter and let me smell the unlit cigars, telling me what notes to look for. Like fragrance, some cigars smelled leathery or nutty, some more floral, and still others, chocolatey.
My most recent memory of him also revolves around smell, and it’s the one that lingers. It’s the acridly sweet smell of his hospital room, the tinge of metallic iron, and the faint aroma of microwaved cafeteria food creeping in from the hallway. Once he passed, my grandfather no longer smelled like tobacco leaves and smoke—he was gone, as was the scent that defined so much of my childhood.
In the 14 years since his death, I’ve caught only whiffs of my grandfather. They come when I’m huddled in the back lawn at a wedding, or emit from a stranger’s leather jacket in a movie theatre. It wafted from the door of a cigar lounge that barred my friend and I from entry—“No Women Allowed”—a stark departure from the shop that my grandfather revered.
I thought I’d lost real, unabridged access to that scent forever. As a beauty editor, I’d tried plenty of fragrances with tobacco notes, but none that ever struck a chord. That is, until I tried Le Labo’s Tabac 28, one of their City Exclusive scents (it’s usually only available in their Miami store, but occasionally, Le Labo opens this collection to other cities). Unlike most fragrances, which have tobacco in the background, this one is a tobacco-forward scent. It’s fitting for Miami, but for me, it immediately conjured my grandfather’s effortlessly cool aviators, his pocketed T-shirts, and his silver hair. Made by perfumer Frank Voelkl, the juice is unapologetic tobacco, mixed with guaiac wood, rum, cedar, and cardamom. This was the first of many tobacco perfumes that have helped me remember my grandfather, and that’s thanks in large part to perfumers reimagining how tobacco works in fragrances.
Tobacco is classified as a woodsy note. “Adding tobacco into a fragrance brings a nuanced layer of smokiness to a scent,” says Linda Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation. “It can project sweetness or come off spicy, smooth as suede and leathery.”
Perfumer Ben Krigler says that tobacco has become so popular recently, thanks in large part to a spiked interest in spicier, more potent scents. “Tobacco scents are sensual, seductive, and mark the brain,” he says. “They leave a strong path. People wearing tobacco are people who want to make a statement, and they don’t want to be forgotten.”
“The rich notes of tobacco have become more nuanced based on the mix of other ingredients in a specific fragrance,” Levy adds. “Recently, tobacco has been combined with sweet ingredients such as vanilla or honey, evolving from its more traditional mix of musk or even deeper ingredients, such as oud.”
New tobacco fragrances are wearable and playful. They’re like a bottled version of the night my grandfather and I spent on the porch, rather than the stuffy cigar lounge that wouldn’t let me in. These fragrances combine tobacco with notes like plum and vanilla (Victoria Beckham’s 21:50 Reverie), honey (Guerlain’s Tobacco Honey), and rockrose resin (Coty Paris’s Après L’Amour). They’re a way for me to pay homage to my grandfather—without ever damaging my lungs.
My personal experience offers proof of something we’ve long heard—that scents are strongly tied to memories. According to several studies, this kind of fragrance-induced memory is actually a physiological response. A 2021 study in the Progress in Neurobiology Journal showed that smell has a stronger link to memory than any other of our five senses. Another 2021 study in Nature showed that these associative memories—the ones that come up when you smell something, like how I think of my grandfather when I smell tobacco—are associated with dopamine. “That physiological reaction and personal connection to recalling a special moment when encountering a scent naturally draws us closer to it becoming part of our fragrance wardrobe,” Levy says.
Like my grandfather, I too now often smell like tobacco when I enter a room. And if he were alive today, I think he’d like dissecting the notes with me like he did with pristine cigars when I was young. Maybe I’d even earn his rarest compliment: “It smells almost as good as a Cuban.”