Perfume

Aroma, odor, covering up that stinking mess...

You know the old saying, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? Well, I have a new one, you can’t put perfume on a load of shit and make it smell like roses. No matter what you do, the stink will always come through. Oh the marketing execs, and the PR spin doctors, try to play cover up by putting pretty a little perfumery spritz on something inglorious. But if you dig deep enough, the rot always comes through.

Ok, this is a way to talk about perfume. By the way, I love perfume. I find it glamorous and classy, well some perfumes at least. Chanel #5, comes to mind. It is my favorite. And yes, I know Coco Chanel was a Nazi collaborator. I had not even known how bad it was until I watched the Apple TV show, The New Look. (You really need to watch the show if you haven’t already. Not only for the production value, the talented actors, the script, but it is real history. Not like the crap you get from Tik Tok.)

I have to be honest, after watching that show, I would stare at my bottle of Chanel #5 and simply could not put it on. Happily, someone actually suggested I look up the history of the Chanel company. I found to my great joy, that the company is actually owned by a Jewish family (the one from the show) and Karl Lagerfeld led a very big effort to right any wrongs that may have come from anything Coco had done. So you can bet, that perfume got spritzed right away. (They gave millions of dollars to Israel to help the survivors of the October 7 massacre.)

The question I would like to ask though, is what is it about perfume that so entrances us and our sensibilities?

Why does perfume bring us joy? (And yes, I know there are people that cannot stand perfume, that many have allergic reactions to perfume.)

Since we are animals, at our most basic instinct, wouldn’t a natural odor or aroma, be what attracts us?

Afterall, we humans are sensual creatures. We not only feel, see, taste, and touch, but smell is essential to our enjoyment of life. In fact, smell is quite essential in human procreation. Well that and a romantic dinner, an expensive bauble, and the husband actually taking care of the kids for the afternoon.

But perfume, or smell, is also something used to denote fallacies and lies. “Something doesn’t smell right,” "seems fishy," "has a strange odor," "off-putting scent," "doesn't pass the sniff test," or "has a peculiar aroma."

What actually is it about smell that it is so essential to who we are and how we interact with the world? Being able to smell the enemy coming, is what saved many an ancient from being overrun, or being slaughtered. Being able to smell, keeps many mammals alive because they smell the predators before they are ambushed.

I remember the actual clamour when a side effect of COVID was that you lose your sense of taste and smell. This of course made sense, you cannot taste without the ability to smell. In fact, the husband lost his sense of taste and smell twice. Even to this day, he needs things really spacey to be able to taste anything. He invariably will tell me he can’t smell anything when I ask him about a weird odor, or something that might be bothersome.

Smell looms large in our existence. It is part of the lizard brain. Something so primal that we cannot survive without it. Yet, I wonder if we have lost some of that instinct to know when something is not quite right?

Have we been so inured to reality through social media and video games that we can no longer see what is right before our eyes? Have we been made complacent to the point that everything either passes, or doesn’t pass the smell test? Are we happy to put perfume on a load of dog poo simply because it is our dog that took the dump and say it is wonderful?

When did we, as a society, decide to die on every hill that our side of the aisle stands for? When did we decide to ignore the fact that simply because it is our side that hands us a bowl of crap saying its soup, doesn’t mean we have to eat it. Why are we so intent on refusing to use our noses, and why are we happy to give up our sense of smell?

As I said, I like perfume. I love chanel#5. The other perfume I have on my vanity is shalimar. But it does seem a little different than in the past. In fact, I was told by the clerk at the Guerlain counter that they had changed the formula in order to attract younger clients. I wish they hadn’t. I am an old fogey. Somethings just really don’t need to be changed. Newer is not always better. There was a je ne sais quoi, I found very exotic about shalimar in the past. Now it smells like cotton balls, and talcum powder.

Formulas can change. Ideas can develop. Hates can metastasize. Stupidity can manifest itself as selfrighteousness. But we should never lose the smell instinct. Essentially it is what has kept us alive as a species, with or without perfume.

DAY 462 OF THE HOSTAGES BEING HELD IN GAZA 🎗️

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