RLT Interview #9: Tracy Wan, Writer, Invisible Stories

On grace, Byredo's Pulp, and misplaced desire.

Correction: In my Taste Log 004 post, I meant to say that I donated to the International Federation of Journalists, Safety Fund.

The RLT Interview explores all the things, people, and places that have informed a person's taste and, more importantly, sense of self.

This week, I chat with Toronto-based brand consultant and writer Tracy Wan, who writes about perfume and talks about it on her very popular TikTok, Invisible Stories.

Get to know Tracy as she muses about grace, discovering Pulp by Byredo, and misplaced desire.

On Taste 

Part of, or most of, my taste is something I was born with. In the nature versus nurture conversation, a lot of it is nature, to my own surprise. My sister and I grew up in different households; we didn't really spend any of our time together. But as adults now, as we're getting closer, we're discovering that we have the same taste for a lot of things. I'll buy a shirt and then send her a photo, and she'll be like, I just bought a shirt in that same color. Or she'll discover a band, and I'll be like, I used to love that band when I was 20. So, there are these coincidences—but I don't think they're coincidences—that tell me a part of taste, at least for me, is very innate. You're born with your preferences, and obviously, they do change—just like taste buds change, olfactory receptors change, and all of that. You do evolve over time, but some people are born not liking certain things, and they'll never like certain things. All of life is really a chance to refine and shape the thing you were already born with.

I think of that—this is so pretentious—that quote from Michelangelo, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” You're born with this rough, brute mass, and then, if you're lucky, you get the chance to whittle at it, really understand it, find examples of it, and surround yourself with things that are manifestations of your taste. But most of it is already there.

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I was one of those immigrant older daughters who was forced to become an adult really quickly. This is not a therapy session, but my parents, instead of childcare, would just dump me at the library. As a result, I'm very cerebral as a person. I don’t spend a lot of time making things or feeling things. I mean, I do now because I appreciate textures, materials, and construction, especially when it comes to fashion. But for the most part, I’m a very abstract person.

I had phases. As a child, I was really into the animal kingdom for a while and read a lot of encyclopedias about animals. Then I got really into rocks and gemology. I loved books about botany. I loved books about space. Anything that taught me about the expanse of the universe, I was really into. And I love—this is so heady—I love nouns. I love learning new words for things. If there’s a type of plant and I can find out the name of that plant, and I can name it and understand it, I love collecting things like that.

Otherwise, I am very inspired by the natural world; that was the other side of being alone—taking a lot of walks by myself. I grew up in Mississippi for a time as a child and then in Quebec City, and these are places where I had access to a lot of nature, rivers and woods. I’ve really developed a love for the natural world, almost as an escape, I think, from a very tumultuous childhood, my relationship with my parents, fighting with them a lot, all of that.

On Discovery 

I've always been very scent-oriented. I have a sensitive nose and a sensitive palate. I've always loved food and cooking, so I think all of that is interconnected. When I was in high school, I had a friend who loved perfumes. She was of Mexican heritage and grew up with perfumes, and she introduced me to a few. I didn’t really have the resources or the willingness from my parents to dabble in fragrance then, but that was when I first learned there was such a thing as something you spray to smell good.

I started stopping at duty-free shops, saying, “Hey, Dad, can I get a bottle of this?” It took some time to convince my parents, but things really catapulted when I got my first job. It was next to a department store in Toronto called Holt Renfrew, which had an array of niche perfume brands. At the time, Byredo was very popular. I have this clear memory of going there on a lunch break, getting a sample of Byredo's Pulp, and smelling it. It was such an expansive experience—it made me think of all these images and feelings I couldn’t quite put into words. I was immediately compelled to start a scent blog, write about Pulp, and explore what it was about. As a person who loves to name and pinpoint things, it was a really fun challenge to be exposed to a world that doesn’t have any language attached to it. That was really where it began. 

Then I started going on decant and sample websites like Surrender to Chance or Perfumed Court. I got into Tom Ford and gradually made my way through, collecting all of these little vials—it was a slippery slope from there. 

I have had the same taste in fragrance most of my life. I always gravitate toward the same notes, and I think a lot of that is cultural. Chinese people tend to love light, citrusy, floral, green fragrances. I love light, citrusy, floral, green fragrances. Is it a coincidence? Is it cultural? Is it inherited? I don’t know, but it’s been like that my whole life.

What I’ve really tried to push myself to do is not be exclusionary in my pursuit of fragrance. I like to surprise myself, so I’ll often order things that make me think, “I don’t think I’ll like this,” but I like the idea or the concept, so I’m just going to smell it and see if it takes me by surprise. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s a worthwhile pursuit for me.

At this point in my life, I have so many friends in the fragrance industry that I often discover new scents through them—what they’re wearing, what they’re talking about, and what they’re excited about. There are also a couple of podcasts in the fragrance world that I love. One of my friends, Emma Vernon, is on TikTok; she’s a comedian and a scent consultant. She has a podcast called The Perfume Room where she interviews content creators, perfumers, perfume brand owners, and everyone affiliated with the fragrance world. She always asks the most amazing questions, and I think she really started these deeper conversations in fragrance—about more than just the scents themselves, but also the relationships, the emotions, and everything tied to them. 

A couple of other friends, Jeff and Jane, have a fragrance podcast called Fragraphilia. They’re fragrance nerds like I am, and they obviously love it beyond just consumption. I love hearing their perspectives on it as well.

On Beauty

Grace is the thing I’m looking for in just about everything. I love a graceful sentence. I love a graceful pose. I love a graceful garment. I love the way certain fabrics fold and fall, and I really look up to people who have a sense of grace about them. I was just listening to the Ta-Nehisi Coates interview with Jon Stewart, and then the other one on CBS, and I was like, “Wow, this man just has the most graceful control over his ideas, his language, and his emotions.”

Grace is absolutely a physical thing, but it’s also very much an emotional and way-of-life word. So, I look for that in everything, and that’s generally what I find to be the most beautiful. I find the natural world to be a great example of this. I’m always stopping and snapping photos of the way light falls on a certain patch of grass or the way a rose has unfolded. These natural forms, colors, and textures are just so poignant and evocative for me.

On Desire 

My life is surrounded by beautiful things. I love to acquire them, in part because I just love beauty and I love being surrounded by it. I'm very much of the belief that something I acquire has to either be useful or beautiful. 

Last night, a friend texted me asking, “Do you have any empty perfume bottles?” and I was like, “No, I don’t have a single empty perfume bottle.” My bottles are full. I don’t wear anything. I buy them because I want to have access to this beautiful idea or this world that you can disappear into if you put it on. I love having access to that, but often I’m not wearing it. 

I was thinking a lot about that and why it is that I’m surrounded by these beautiful things I don’t interact with. I think what it comes down to is that I thought I was buying something because I wanted it, but I was really trying to access an emotion that I didn’t have, and often that emotion is a feeling of satisfaction, completion, or belonging.

I buy things because I feel isolated from other people sometimes, and I want to have a means of reaching out to them through having, say, a new perfume that I can talk about. Obviously, in these communities built around the consumption—#perfumetok, #jewelrytok, #fashiontok—these are ways of being in conversation with people. But it hasn't been successful in building the communities or the relationships or the intimacy that I actually want.

Temporarily, it fills some sort of void, but that obviously goes away—and then I am left with the same kind of loneliness that I had to begin with.

So, I think a lot of my desire is mistranslated. It feels like taking medicine for the wrong illness.

On Pleasure 

This is a tough one for me because, again, as a child who had to grow up quickly, I never played. I associate the word pleasure with play, and I feel like I’m incapable of it. But my adult self has found substitutes for play or adult versions of play.

Cooking is a strong vehicle for pleasure for me—cooking, eating, and eating with people. I love taking raw ingredients and transforming them into a meal. I love sitting down with somebody, feeding them a dish, and seeing how they react to it. That’s very pleasurable for me.

I think most of my pleasures are sense-based, just because I’m a very sensorial person. So, I love being in nature, touching trees, touching rocks, and hiking.

What is the last thing I did for pleasure? 
I signed up for a class through the Institute for Art and Olfaction. It's called Materials Evaluation. Essentially what we do is smell different aromachemicals and natural ingredients in perfumery every week, for 11 weeks.

What's the last thing you bought?
My friend Arabelle Sicardi is doing an event called Against Orientalism, where she's gathering a bunch of people to smell six fragrances made by Asian American or Asian perfumers as a way of reclaiming the term “oriental” from how it's been used in the fragrance industry thus far. She’s introducing people to a sub-world in the fragrance industry that they might not be familiar with. All this to say, it comes with a sample pack, and I bought that sample pack off of Luckyscent.

What's the last thing you read?
The last thing that I read is a book called Splinters by Leslie Jamison, which is a memoir about her experience of having a baby and going through a divorce at the same time. Leslie Jamison has a very, to go back to our earlier conversation, graceful grasp on language. I was listening to the book, and I would often have to stop and literally inhale and exhale for a couple of beats, because her sentences are so deft and precise and beautiful. 

What's the last thing you watched or saw?
I just started the show, Nobody Wants This on Netflix. I used to have a crush on Seth Cohen when I was a child. I mean, who didn't?  So I was mostly curious about how Adam Brody has evolved. Turns out he's exactly the same.

What's the last good meal you had?
I went to my friend Eva Chin’s soft opening for her restaurant, Yan Dining Room. She is a Chinese chef, but she has lived all over the world. She grew up in Hawaii, is of Hawaiian, Singaporean and Chinese descent, lived in the US, trained in France, et cetera, so she has all of these influences coming into her cooking, which she calls Neo-Chinese. It's a version of Chinese food that's trying to shed the idea that to be authentic it has to to be a certain structure, and it could be authentic in new ways—as in, incorporating the same flavors or ingredients, but in new forms or with external influences. She is an amazing cook. Her cooking is very graceful, it's delicate and precise, and the flavors are all immaculately balanced. 

What are you coveting right now? 
Clarity. I feel very muddy at the moment. A little bit restless, swimming in unclear waters. What I'm really coveting is that feeling when you're hungover and you think, “This isn't right,” and then the next morning you wake up and think, “Damn, this feels so good” compared to the day before. That’s the feeling I’m looking for: everything is in its right place. 

What's the last thing you disliked?
I listened to the new Jamie xx album. I loved his previous album, but this new one, In Waves, sounds messy. It sounds like the internal state that I was just describing. It’s like someone put on a club playlist from decades ago and just hit shuffle every minute. I found it chaotic and did not enjoy it.

What are five things you are really into at the moment? 

1. This essay by Hanif Abdurraqib, whose writing always sounds like music in my ear.

2. Fischersund, a family-run perfumery and art collective out of Reykjavik. Their main perfumer is Jónsi, who is better known for his musical career, and as the vocalist for Sigur Ros. Their perfumes feel very much rooted in Iceland—they use natural materials they harvest and extract themselves. 

3. Perfect Days by Wim Wenders. A slow, beautiful film about the little things that add up to everything.

4. The light in Jeremy Miranda’s paintings.

5. The fact that all of the citruses we know today are hybrids, descended from the same handful of ancestral species. I love saying “mother citrus.”

What do you smell like? 
This perfume I fell in love with when I was last in China. It’s called 老头 (Old Man), and it’s made by YILI Olfactory Art, an artisan perfumer from Beijing. I smelled a bunch of her work this summer and connected with it immediately. This scent smells like oversteeped tea, Chinese medicine, and chocolatey patchouli. It dries down with a cooling clarity and reminds me of the years I spent in early childhood, living with my grandparents.

What beauty products do you use over and over? 
Again with the beautiful and the useful. My perfumes are the beautiful part, so I keep my beauty products very functional. Aleppo soap. Eucerin body lotion. The product I’ve repurchased the most is probably C.R.E.A.M., a barrier-repair moisturizer from Regimen, a Canadian skincare brand. I overdid it on actives in my 20s and fucked up my face, likely gave myself rosacea. Now I keep it simple.

What's one thing in your closet, or perfume collection that you'd never get rid of?
It is a massive bottle of a perfume called Vetiver by Dior, part of their private collection. I smelled it in perfume school during a summer in Grasse a few years ago, and it was one of the perfumes they handed out as an example of a good vetiver. At the time, they said, “Oh yeah, it’s only sold at certain Dior stores.” I went to Cannes that same year to find it, and they said, “No, you have to go to Paris.” I didn’t have time, but years later, I went to Paris, and they said, “We have one bottle left.” It was all very rarefied, though I don’t think it’s discontinued—just hard to get. 

Vetiver is one of the strange perfume notes I loved before I knew what it was. It’s been a throughline in everything I love. My partner's perfume has it. Anything I try on and love, I often find it’s Vetiver. It’s been this consistent thread in my taste that I later discovered had a name, which excites me.

The perfume I’m talking about is a minimal rendition of vetiver—it’s nutty, grassy, green, and unchanging. “Linear” is what they call it in the fragrance industry, meaning it’s consistent from start to finish. If I were to pick a scent to represent me as a person, it would be that.

What's something you spent a lot of money on that was worth it?
I have spent a lot of money on perfume. Is it a hobby? Is it a profession? Is it an education? Is it a way of looking at the world? I'm not sure, but I'm hedging my bets that it's all of it because of the amount of money I’ve put into this, what some people call "just a frilly little hobby", is absurd.

What's something you spent a lot of money on that wasn't worth?
I bought a Lemaire bag last year. I've always loved the brand, and part of me thought, “I'm a full-grown adult, I've been freelancing for a couple of years, I’ve been fairly successful at it, and I have a history of not celebrating my accomplishments.” In some misguided moment, I thought the Lemaire bag was a good way of doing that. So I bought the bag. It’s cute, but it does nothing for me. It’s a very soft, beautiful, delicate leather that I have a hard time wearing out because I’m afraid of damaging it.

This is what I think Helen Rosner, the food writer, coined as a “paralysis of wonder.” She was talking about having yuzus that were gifted to her that she didn’t know what to do with, so she just let them rot in her fridge because she couldn’t honor them enough. I feel a little bit like that—having all these beautiful things, but the occasions I move through on a day-to-day basis don’t match. So, I have nowhere to wear the Lemaire bag to, or there's always a risk of rain, and I don’t want to ruin this very soft, delicate leather. It was a very impractical purchase, and I’m not sure I’d make it again.

What's something you always recommend or give to people?
Bluets by Maggie Nelson. It's the thing that I've recommended the most in my life. It’s a book that I think anyone who appreciates language will like. 

What does it mean to have taste?
To make easier decisions. 

Whose taste do you admire, even if it’s not like your own? 
My friend Joanne’s. She’s one of those people who elude definition. Sensitive, resourceful, endlessly curious. She’s always introducing me to music and movies I’d never heard of. 

All photos courtesy of Tracy.