Your memory isn’t deceiving you: if you’ve ever buried your nose in a bunch of these beautiful, delicate blue (or sometimes white or pink) flowers hoping for a whiff of something equally gorgeous, you’ll have been disappointed: they’ve almost no scent at all.
So why does forget-me-not sometimes appear as a fragrance ingredient? (It’s even the name of a particular scent, from the Capri-based perfume house Carthusia). Our hunch is that forget-me-not is simply there to help conjure up an image for the perfume – either to give a sense of delicacy and softness, or for emotional reasons: according to folklore, the wearers of forget-me-nots would not be forgotten, by their lovers…