When I was a blithe young thing I took to wearing Lancome's Magie Noire as a "good" fragrance. It had been the scent of the most glamourous woman I knew (glamourous women were not thick on the ground in Erie County, New York and it paid to watch them closely) and when I left for college I adopted it as my own, although I understood even then that its power was more Grown Woman and so much less 18 Year Old Playing Dress Up. It was my choice for hundreds of after-dark outings - to fraternity parties as well as dinners with Somewhat Older Boys Also Playing Dress Up - and if I couldn't quite handle the scent's blatant invitation, and I couldn't, I experienced no trouble because neither could those who might have tried had any been more experienced and/or competent in that area than I. While I smelled lovely as I swept through the streets of Powelton Village, Magie Noire's seductive potential was utterly lost on someone so young and also so very young, if you get my meaning.*
By the time I'd grown up enough to really own the scent something had changed and it (or I) was no longer the same. I wanted to love it still, to walk around all sexy and fatale smelling, but no. We're no longer right for each other, Magie Noire and I (pretending for a moment that we ever were), and I have been on the hunt for something to take its place for years.
This is not to say that I don't wear scents, because I do. I've had an extended on-again-off-again flirtation with Shiseido's Saso, and I've dabbled a bit in the whole shower-gel-and-spray thing - although why these things come in fruit scents I will never understand. Who wishes to smell like a buffet luncheon's salad cup? Not I. Let's see...there was a brief enthusiasm for Isabella Rosselini's Manifesto that died as quickly as its own basil notes, as well as a very short fling with something by Laura Ashley that I admired chiefly for its bottle. And then there was some men's scent that was loosely based on lavender which promised to settle down to something only sort-of masculine but never did.
I deal with my own prejudices. I will not wear anything celebrity "created" - not Britney, not Mariah, not Jennifer and not (just for consistency's sake because I understand that Lovely is, well, lovely) Sarah Jessica. Will not. I will not wear anything that's too easy to obtain (I know, I know, snob) and do not wish to wear anything that might be described as a blockbuster - if it's commonly acknowledged that women do not wish to dress alike it should not be so hard to extrapolate that we also do not wish to smell alike.
And there's my husband. He has a conflicted relationship with scents - loves them wafting up from, say, a double of Macallan 18 or maybe a particularly rich cigar. He can smell a piece of milk chocolate from a league away and relishes the old roses that grow along our stone wall, but hates anything that reminds him of grass that requires mowing, aged women of his relation (loves the women, doesn't wish me to smell like them), exotic fruits, pine, too many flowers in a too small room or baby powder. The only scent he ever wears is Paco Rabanne Pour Homme and has made one bottle last nearly 15 years (and counting). You could say he's indifferent, I suppose, to the whole notion of fragrance and his rather minimal requirement of me is that I don't make him sneeze (this, I realize, is a very low bar seduction-wise). If he could choose a scent for me, it would probably be something on the order of single-malt/Hershey Kiss/roses/tobacco/leather. (Interestingly, this might actually be possible. Me having a fragrance like that, I mean, not him actually set out to choose one on my behalf.)
Where this leaves me, I don't know. I've haunted the perfume counter at my local Nordstrom's to the point where I may be believed to be a stalker and I've even sprung for a few small bottles of things from Ebay that sounded like they might be right for me, but weren't (Creed's Royal English Leather among them, sigh). I spritzed nearly every Jo Malone fragrance carried by a boutiquey place in Charlottesville until the proprietress got all narrow-eyed and frownish with me and I had to buy some Zoppini charms to calm her. There was even a very short and quite disastrous homebrew attempt with oils bought at a hippy dippy health foods store-cum-homeopathic supply shop.
Am I asking too much? What I want is something that smells like me, but better, that will make my husband lean in for a second welcome home kiss now and will remember me to my children when I'm gone, one that makes me smile and surreptitiously (or not) sniff the inside of my elbow all day, one that whispers come back when I've gone off flirting with something else.
There is a sale at The Perfumed Court. It may be time to get serious.
* This was back in the days of Poison and Knowing, when everyone went around smelling like floozies as a matter of course.