Captured in Scent: Sunday Drive – A Thunderstorm Memory in Motion
Memory as Muse: The Backseat View
Some memories don’t live in snapshots or heirlooms—they live in motion. For me, it’s a car ride. A stretch of rainy asphalt under a canopy of trees. The dull rhythm of windshield wipers, and the glisten of stormlight on Michigan City Road. This was no dramatic adventure—just a drive toward my grandparents’ house. Yet that drive holds the kind of nostalgia that catches you off-guard. Soft, steady, sacred.
My grandfather, Edward, wasn’t a gearhead, but he was always in a quiet motion. Driving, exploring, tinkering. His garage was a second living room: a dark wood cathedral filled with tools, rubber hoses, and vintage tins—smelling of oil, mothballs, and time. It was the welcome mat to their world. That car, that garage, that rain-soaked road—they became a constellation of memories, and eventually, the muse for this scent.
From Notes to Nostalgia: Building a Stormy Drive
As I was concepting the collection for Le Reliquaire, I knew I wanted to experiment with geosmin, a note simulating petrichor— the gritty, dusty scent that whirls up just at the beginning of a rainstorm— at the heart of one of my scents and I knew this fragrance would be one about my grandfather.
The first time I experienced geosmin, it was like stepping into that Sunday drive. Suddenly I was watching raindrops race each other across the backseat window, clouds pressing low above the treetops of Wentworth Woods. I could hear the tires hiss against wet gravel and feel that electric stillness just before the sky split open.
To balance geosmin’s deep, earthy weight, I needed to create lift—something that would evoke the optimism of a quiet drive, the lightness of idle conversation, a lift in the atmospheric qualities of the note. I reached for orange, anise, and petitgrain. The result was a fresh, almost-fizzy brightness—like citrus mist rising through damp air, the kind of lightness that lives in the scent of pavement just kissed by rain.
Together, these notes formed a scent that was grounded, but never heavy. Atmospheric, but approachable. A layered fragrance that felt like weather and warmth in equal parts.
Emotional Register: The Storm
The idea of a thunderstorm in the canon of Edward’s persona wasn’t just symbolic in the context of a drive. For my grandfather, an avid bowler, a thunderstorm wasn’t just weather. It was theater. Whenever the sky started to rumble, he’d say: “The angels are bowling.” A flash of lightning? That was a strike.
That saying stayed with me. It transformed something unpredictable into something endearing. That’s what I wanted this scent to hold—the sense of comfort within change, of movement wrapped in affection. A scent that could ground you even as the sky opened up around you.
Sunday Drive is that moment when a storm feels like a shared secret. When the air is charged, but your shoulders are relaxed. When the world outside might be shifting, but you’re safe inside a memory in motion.
The Persona of Sunday Drive
He’s the quiet observer, the one who always knows the best back roads. He keeps a flashlight in the glove compartment, a spare rag in the trunk. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, it’s something that sticks. He lives in the hum of the engine, the clink of tools in a wood-paneled garage, and the sudden thrill of a summer storm.
Sunday Drive is his scent—steady, tender, a little mysterious. Like petrichor caught in motion.
Lab-to-Label: Our Philosophy in Practice
At Le Reliquaire, fragrance is developed the way a memory is recalled—unexpectedly, intimately, layer by layer. With Sunday Drive, we followed our memory-first development process, beginning with a single emotional note—geosmin—and building around it until the scent felt whole, familiar, and true.
We don’t chase perfumery rules. We chase recognition—that moment when you inhale and something long-forgotten stirs. Each candle we create is a portrait in scent. And Sunday Drive is a portrait of quiet masculinity, of warmth and weather, of movement through memory.
