Prince Harry has revealed how the smell of Princess Diana’s perfume helped him cope with her death.
In his new memoir, Spare, which came out on 10 January, the Duke of Sussex expressed his feeling of grief after his mother died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, at the age of 36. Harry was 12 years old at the time of Diana’s death.
He went on to note how his therapist urged him to reflect on what he remembered about his mother, including “bedtimes in Kensington Palace,” when he’d go from “inhaling her perfume” to then “lying in bed”.
“We’re breaking through,” Harry’s therapist told him. “Let’s not stop there.”
The royal then revealed that during one of his therapy sessions, he brought “a bottle of Mummy’s favourite perfume to the office,” before explaining how he felt when smelling it.
“First, by Van Cleef & Arpels. At the start of our session, I lifted the lid, took a deep sniff. Like a tab of LSD,” he wrote.
He further explained why this perfume was so powerful, writing: “I read somewhere that smell is our oldest sense, and that fitted with what I experienced in that moment, images rising from what felt like the most primal part of my brain.”
Harry continued to describe some of the memories that came back to him after smelling the perfume.
“I remember one day at Ludgrove, Mummy stuffing sweets into my sock,” he wrote. “Outside sweets were forbidden, so Mummy was flouting school rules, giggling as she did so, which made me love her even more.”
Along with his memoir, Harry expressed how his therapist and mother’s perfume helped him process his grief in Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
He explained that while he’s had a “wall” up that had made it difficult to heal from his mother’s death, he’s now been able to “see over it”.
“The wall has reduced in size,” he told the late-night talk show host. “That is partly through writing a book, partly through therapy, and having her scent, her perfume. And spraying it and being able to unlock memories that I never thought I had.”
Elsewhere in his memoir, Harry reflected on the night before his mother’s death and how his father’s signature scent was quite noticeable that evening.
“He (King Charles III) was always sniffing things. Food, roses, our hair,” he wrote. “He must’ve been a bloodhound in another life. Maybe he took all of those sniffs because it was hard to smell anything over his personal scent. Eau Sauvage.”
He also noted how his father’s cologne actually made him think of his late mother.
“He’d slather the stuff on his cheeks, his neck, his shirt,” Harry wrote. “Flowery, with a hint of something harsh, like pepper or gunpowder, it was made in Paris. Said on the bottle. Which made me think of Mummy.”
