Prince Harry has revealed how the smell of his mother Princess Diana’s perfume helped him cope with her death. The Duke of Sussex expressed his feeling of grief after Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Harry was then 12 years old.
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In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry said that his therapist urged him to reflect on what he remembered about Diana, including “bedtimes in Kensington Palace,” when he’d go from “inhaling her perfume” to then “lying in bed”.
“We’re breaking through,” Prince Harry’s therapist told him. “Let’s not stop there.”
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Prince Harry then shared that 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,” Prince Harry wrote.
“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,” Prince Harry wrote saying that he then described some of his memories with Diana after smelling the perfume.
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“I remember one day at Ludgrove, Mummy stuffing sweets into my sock,. Outside sweets were forbidden, so Mummy was flouting school rules, giggling as she did so, which made me love her even more,” Prince Harry wrote.
