Prologue: Created 1995 - never actually read on the radio. But it's not horrible, I don't think. I've evolved, though; I do now wear a small bit of cologne sometimes.
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"To smell, though well, is to stink."
-- Michel de Montaigne
I was out jogging the other day when I was passed by a red Jaguar that smelled strangely fragrant, as if the exhaust were one part gasoline and two parts White Shoulders perfume. Whether the car had a hot date with a pickup or was merely testing some sort of alternative fuel I'm not sure, but I've heard the idea that one day we'll be able to run our cars on water, so anything's possible. For now, though, I'll stick with a conservative assumption: that the smell was actually coming from inside the car--from the wrists, ankles, shoulders, and neck of the woman driving. . . with her windows rolled up. I imagined how, if I were hitchhiking in the desert and hers was the first car to come by for three days, I'd be better off, health-wise, to stick to the fresh air and fight off the vultures.
It seems these days in my sort of naturalistic area of the country, the Pacific Northwest, there are fewer people wearing perfume and cologne, but those who still wear it seem to make up for the people who don't, and then some. Whether other people refrain from wearing it out of respect for the ozone layer or the sensitive noses of the local deer I'm not sure, but I myself haven't worn cologne on a regular basis since high school. I'd just rather use plain old deodorant and smell like nothing at all than subject innocent people to some artificial scent I was convinced to buy after seeing a magazine ad implying I needed a heavy masking odor, not just so I could smell nice, but so I could prance about in the black and white setting of a Mondrian painting with beautiful waifs like Kate Moss in tow or otherwise in submission.Of course, perfume in moderation isn't all that bad, but I think there should be some kind of law restricting its use like they restrict the volume of radios on the beach in the summertime. Where I used to live, in San Diego, you could get a ticket for disturbing the peace if a lifeguard could hear your radio from more than a hundred feet away. A good rule for perfume, I think, would be that if someone can smell your perfume, without kissing your neck, you're wearing too much. Scent addicts and perfume industry lobbyists would disagree, of course, and they would probably argue that if you can't smell someone from at least fifty feet away then the perfume isn't doing its job of being that initial attractor, the thing that gets you noticed, that gets you past the first step in courting, just like all the ads imply. But it's the rare person, I think, who's impressed by how much money someone spends on their smell or by how quickly they're able to get through that king-sized jug of Brut. Others might argue that they wear perfume for the sexually intriguing animal musks, but our bodies are actually stimulated by less than a quadrillionth of an ounce of that secretion, so the irony is that people would be more sexually excited by someone who had just cuddled a pot-bellied pig than someone who suffocates all the other riders on an elevator with gallons of Christian Dior's aptly named "Poison."Kouros, Egoïste, Eternity, White Diamonds, Obsession, Stetson. . . all scent names intended to hint at not just what the smell is--rich and sophisticated for Liz Taylor's White Diamonds, range-roving-manly for Stetson--but also to provoke the idea of belonging, of being desired, perhaps even obsessed over. But to what extent should you be allowed to assault the most acute of human senses? Where does your personal zone end and your neighbor's begin, and should you just flirt with the edge of that zone or should you charge it like blitzkrieg, your scent the rumbling tanks, your personality just the footsoldiers?There's a happy medium somewhere between the nape of your neck and your neighbors' noses, and the distance between the two will change according to whether someone is aroused, intrigued, disgusted, or simply overwhelmed by your smell. I tend to prefer scents that you have to get really close to smell, and aren't just the smell of the product, but the product plus the body, like a clean-smelling soap on soft skin, or the strawberry shampoo or lilac deodorant that an old girlfriend used to use; more personal smells that don't assault but, rather consent; smells that rely not on commercially created images, but real love, and real intimacy. Perhaps this says more about the human need for close relationships than it does about the attractiveness of any kind of natural or artificial scent, or perhaps it says more about me than anyone else. But I can live with that. I don't mind sharing a bit of myself, and I won't hide behind a blanket of cologne.
