Sue's reactions (over at A Kitchen in Brabant) to perfume shopping sent me off on a tangent.
I've found that quite a lot of perfumes (along with perfumed household sprays) give me a rather nasty headache.
To add insult to injury, most perfumes react badly to my skin chemistry; usually they either stink outright on me, or they turn sickly, cloyingly sweet. And this is not a subjective opinion - even the most desperate commission-based sales person recoils with a glazed look in the eyes and tries to suggest: "Well, perhaps madam would like to try XYZ instead..."
The third issue is that they almost immediately disappear - I can douse myself in a bottle and five minutes later no-one can tell that I had been near an atomizer. Except of course if it is one that really turns foul - then the malodorous stench will of course cling to me for a couple of weeks.
(Yes, and good day to you too, Mr. Murphy.)
I have been fortunate in finding a few that do agree with me, and that I happen to like: Christian Dior's Dune, for the spicy, sophisticated, mysterious times. (Well, who am I kidding, there aren't really any of those times in my life, but a girl can dream, can't she?) And Este� Lauder's Pleasures - clean and fresh and pretty, and ready for the day.
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Now when Christmas came around last year, mpo realized on the 24th that he still hadn't bought me a gift, so off he went, braving the mobs on Christmas Eve.
Let me say straigt off, he is not the flowery, chocolatey, demonstrative sort, and special occasions mostly go by without cards or gifts. (Don't start feeling sorry for me, though. There are a myriad other ways in which he is incredibly good to me, far better than the standard romantic gestures.)
Anyway, he must have recalled the incredibly enthusiastic reception when he presented me with Pleasures for our wedding anniversary the year before - what a big surprise given that I had been hinting blatantly that it would be the perfect Christmas or birthday gift for four years straight! My Dune bottle was starting to get low, but he was unable to find some (probably forgot the name, and couldn't adequately describe the bottle's shape ;-) )
So he picked up a bottle of Celine Dion, with the matching body lotion to make a nice set.
It really wasn't his fault. How is he supposed to understand about scents?
I use it periodically, extremely lightly, so as not to hurt his feelings. But I've realized recently that he has no idea how it smells - in fact he can't even really tell the three perfumes I have apart!
I think I should find a worthy cause who wants an almost full bottle, and its matching, unopened body lotion, and donate it this holiday season. After all, I'm sure there must be somebody out there who likes it.
(I've tried passing it off onto my little sister, but she's not having it.)
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More than twelve years ago I rented - at a vastly reduced rate - a beach house belonging to a friend's parents. They had the requisite collection of eclectic paperbacks in the bookcase above the almost-complete sets of Monopoly and chess and decks of cards, next to the bowl with sea-worn pebbles and faded sea shells.
Perfume by Patrick Suskind is set in Paris in the 18th century. Amid a hodge-podge of (mostly bad) smells, a boy is born with no personal odour and, as if to compensate, an extremely sensitive sense of smell.
He becomes involved in the perfume trade and obsessed with a particular fragrance, and lacking conscience and concern to the same extent as personal odour, sets about capturing it.
The book is remarkable for its vivid evocation of aroma through words - fragrances become almost tangible through the descriptions. And what is astonishing that this is done in the translation (from the original German). It is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had more German, so that I could read it in the author's voice.
