Vanilla, (-milk and honey) apple, earth, parchment (+almond)
Tyson wears soft, comforting - homely - scents that are sweet, but not over powering. Only the honey is truly sweet but that is the least prominent scent around Tyson. The apple smells like the fruit (succulent) rather than the sweetness of the cartoned juice. The nostalgic milky-warmth of the vanilla goes hand in hand with the faint creaminess that accompanies the smooth milk scent.
(When working on a job that takes him away from home Tyson is often staying outdoors were he hasn’t got access to a shower. Rather than using his normal liquid soaps he’ll swap to a bar of soap for ease in whatever water he has found; taking away the honey and milk, replacing them with the light nutty aroma of almonds.)
His grandmother, who taught him to play piano, used to bake apple pies with him. She sweetened the pastry by adding vanilla extract, then added a dollop of honey to Tyson’s slice as she served it to him with a glass of milk. Every now and again she’d add a handful of ground almonds to the apple mixture she put in the pie. She passed when Tyson was nine.
Tyson spends so much time with his own dogs, with their fur all over him, that no matter how many times he showers he always has a linger scent of dog. Not in a bad way, not like wet dog, but the soft earthy scent your hands get when they run through a dog’s coat.
Tyson’s own scent is faint. He’s constantly surrounded by paper work and maps making him smell like faded parchment. The paperwork he does during the day in on new fresh, crisp paper but the rest of the paper he handles is old. The mathematics book he flicks through and the maps he handled (other than the custom ones he makes) are all from pre-twentieth century.
Since his teens Tyson had worn Davidoff Cool Water aftershave, it’s been around since 1988. He’s dabbled in other aftershaves, but he had always come back to Cool Water. He takes comfort in the familiarity of the aquatic scent. It smells clean, initially of amber, tobacco, oak-moss, and geranium; he loves how after it begins to fade - roughly forty minutes - it still smells clean and starts to smell like lavender, salt, and mint which hangs around for a good six hours. He’s quite fond that unlike most aquatic aftershaves it doesn’t smell like citric fruits, instead it smells masculine. Original headcanon.
Tyson likes patterns, want everything to be the same, never changing. So he always uses the same brands to clean himself. He uses the excuse of having sensitive skin (which is true, he does) to avoid seeming sentimental but the truth is that he’s been using most of these since he was a boy, since he was nine. When certain brands went out of business he replaced them with the closest brand he could find. He only wears scent less deodorant.
Source of the scents that aren’t Tyson’s own:
