All addictions start somewhere. Everybody has a gateway drug. Mine came in a blue star-shaped container – a gift for 23 year old me from a boyfriend who had some vague sense that men should give women perfume. Those without addictive personalities can sample such things and not fall. Others have susceptibility written into their DNA. That blue bottle contained a brash loud gourmand fragrance called Angel. 6 years (maybe) down the line, one of my closest friends was to review it with the words, “You smell like everybody else!!!” and by then she would be absolutely right. The disco gourmand in the blue star bottle was to take over the perfume world. By then though, like a teenager who’s drunk too much cider in her first alcoholic experiment, I was sickened by the smell of it anyway. Overwhelmed by a sensual experience that could envelope me and travel with me everywhere I went (the sensuality of a lapdancer, as it turned out, in that first bottle, but, ladies and gentlemen, I was 23) I gorged myself silly and had to move to other, more refined, drugs to get my hit.
I’ve known all my life that things of beauty are created by men with the brains of scientists and the souls of artists (I’ve seen the Clifton Suspension Bridge). Within 2 years of that first bottle, my gods amongst men were mostly chemists, of both the professional and the amateur variety. (Did I not tell you I was an addict?) Moving from bottle to bottle (the next was Vivienne Westwood’s Boudoir – it smells powder pink to your grandma and of underwear to your boyfriend, a neat trick) I fell amongst a community of fellow addicts and began to learn the names that walk with me always now and rock me softly to sleep at night after a bad day: Christopher Sheldrake, Dominique Ropion, Jacques Guerlain (bow your head in passing, people, in memory of the man who accidentally created Shalimar), Andy Tauer, the Roudnitskas (father and son). I could go on. And on and on. Linda Pilkington, the untrained genius, anybody?
I know a lot of people who care about perfume, talk about perfume, write about perfume – some at a professional level – I’ll never spray a Jean Claude Ellena scent without hearing the verdict of my friend Tania’s husband, Luca, in their Perfume Guide “angels don’t have sex”. (Although the most scathing perfume review I ever read was written by an amateur, my friend Jane, to describe Serge Luten’s Muscs de Koublai Khan – “smells like unwashed testicles”. She’d never tell us how she knew….”) I talk about it very little, as there are other’s who know far more and speak far better, although my appreciation of the craft underlying each bottle greatly enhances my pleasure. (Once I was afraid that knowing how would ruin it.)
My 23 year old crude sensuality evolved into adulthood. It’s a long time since I sprayed on a scent because it could bring a man sleepwalking to me across a crowded room. (Although if you want them, I know their names, the scents that will make chaps double take and start to follow a stranger up the street, the scents that have dropped long married men on their knees to their wives, begging, the animalic musks and ambergris that can make them pull out their wallets, swearing they’ll spend whatever it takes on them, so long as you’ll wear it for them, only for them…) My perfumes suit my mood and my personality now (and my personality switches with my moods). I have protected myself from a stressful work day with the incense and lilies of Passage d’Enfer, knowing that I smelled like a high church to anyone else who came near me. I have wafted both wrists under the noses of everybody around me, ignored the flowers that every straight man spoke for and bought the smoke of the bonfire that only the gay guy liked – it stopped being about what spoke to other people a long long time ago. I have stood in a NY department store and fought with a sales assistant to buy a fragrance created by a woman later burned as a witch (Santa Maria Novella’s Marescialla) while she tried to direct me to something far more suitably floral than this nutmeg and mace act of sorcerous aggression (“so unladylike!”) I was set upon. My friend Farran, a floral Alabama girl at heart stood by me and valiantly fought my corner, “I don’t care what it smells like on other people, it is WONDERFUL on her.” This week, fearing the loss of something I valued, I kept myself safe in the vanilla hug of Musc Ravageur and stayed safe and comforted.
I smell like a church, like honeyed water, like oranges and curry – to some people, sometimes. I have never yet worn the truly repulsive smell of crypts, but I know who sells it and where you can buy it, if you’re tempted. I don’t care if you like what I’m wearing or not, to be honest. You can have an opinion on my shoes. Tell me I need a haircut, my mother always does. Tell me I’m showing too much leg or not enough cleavage, that I don’t make enough of this or that, that my working look is unprofessional. That’s fine. My perfume belongs to me. Only one rule remains, whatever I smell of during a working day, or on a weekend, on a beach, or out to dinner, there are certain nights when I always smell like a woman. Not a lapdancer, these days, I hope, but unmistakably female, adult and alive with possibility. The scents that you just want to get that little bit closer to, and that little bit closer and that little bit closer, even when you don’t know why. Only two, on days like that: Ormonde Woman’s black hemlock forest or Une Fleur de Cassie’s elegant, come-hither stand-offishness. Don’t wait up.
