Scent Dement

Waterhouse

An unexpected, bemusing byproduct of aging in me has been the emergence--or should I say, the blossoming--of curious serial obsessions.

The tendency has probably always been there. Come to think of it, I recall the All Patrick O'Brian, All The Time stage. And there was the Homegrown Herbs Drying All Over The Kitchen mode, both within the last decade before retirement. And, of course, there's been the Blog Your Brains Out cycle, which keeps trying to wane on me and has to be flogged from time to time. But I think I must have been too busy with work heretofore to have fully experienced my capacity for a groove.

patchouli

Fortunately, there's usually a soft, lingering basenote to my preoccupations. I still love O'Brian, and the lessons learned through my immersion in his glorious, twenty-one novel master work color and enrich every experience for me today. There's still an herb garden each year, still a few bunches of sage and basil drying in the fall, still fresh herbs all summer for my cooking, but I'm no longer fantasizing about becoming an herbalist. I do advise you, though, that organic patchouli is a kick to grow just to crush the leaves in your palms and let their warmth concentrate the scent in a cone around your face. In fact, I find I grow herbs more for their smell than for taste.

And there, right there, is the essence of my current obsession. I have become infatuated with scent. And with perfumes, professional perfumerie, and the science of smell...naturally, since one thing leads to another and I'm free to follow this perfumed path as far as my ardor and my purse strings will take me. Which ain't nearly far enough in the more esoteric reaches of scent.

I've read my way into a small library on the subject. As a sampler, I highly recommend Chandler Burr's The Perfect Scent for a quirky and highly entertaining introduction to the world of professional perfumerie. And his Emperor of Scent for a no-fooling page turner biographical adventure tale on Luca Turin's vibration theory of smell and the reason the molecular shape theory can't possibly be right.

I know you just yawned, but would I ever steer you wrong? Dear Southern Woman, how can a story that prominently features JR's giant cigar store, right on 421 between Dunn and Spivey's Corner, NC, as the mecca of perfume retailing possibly fail you? I'm jonesing for a well-financed road trip pilgrimage.

I've got a garden of bookmarked perfume blogs lined up, some of them gloriously written, underscoring the second hook in this very addictive new hobby of mine: the ability to smell something, whether mesmerizingly gorgeous or wincingly bad, and write about it from the gut and the heart, using all the wonderful words hiding unused in your memory...well, there's a goal worthy of obsession. I can't do it. Yet. But Tania Sanchea can.

Randomly opening her Perfumes, The Guide (with Luca Turin the biophysicist and perfume expert, whose writing style I crave), I find this on the unfortunate (two stars of five) Liberté by the perfume house of Cacharel:

hard candy - If your mouth has ever been roughly cratered along the soft insides of your cheeks from sucking too intently on an orange hard candy, you'll recognize the top note of Liberté. To augment the general air of grade school nostalgia, you get a whiff of inflatable pool toys, too. 

Just saved you from wrapping the gift set for your Mother-In-Law's birthday. Which reminds me. Never gift perfume to anyone--not even your best friend--unless you know her habitual choice and that she didn't suddenly get sick of it when peri-menopause kicked in last week. That goes quadruple for men, minus the menopause; the poor things don't know not to wear the Aramis just because they got such a big bottle of it from someone.

So deeply am I obsessed with perfume suddenly... (I, who could never wear it to work for fear of offending some poor soul stuck in a twelve-by-twelve foot room with me for an hour at a time. Imagine, if you can, seeking help from a marital therapist who smells like the left lapel of your errant husband's topcoat)...I find it hard to STOP writing this post. And I'm still not sure I even LIKE the stuff.

May I just say that I've smelled dozens of perfumes in the last month or so and have found my 2011 light summer favorite, which I wear all the way from the dressing table to the washing machine. It's an unlikely layering of two involving grapefruit and patchouli over tiare with mimosa, but that's another blog post. And I've become an habitué of perfume decant sites that allow you to purchase tiny amounts of eau for sampling. When my daughter-in-law came to visit recently, I corralled her into smelling ALL my samples just for her responses.


And...and...and...


You know, retirement isn't quite like what I thought it would be.