Olfactory Fatigue: Symptoms & Remedies

Smelling perfume is exactly like drinking alcohol. The more you drink, the drunker you get, and the less you can taste what you're drinking (substitute your sense of smell for your sense of taste, and a mild lightheadedness for outright drunkenness).

There are ineffectual quick fixes for olfactory fatigue - sniffing coffee beans or stepping out for air - but they're the equivalent of a cup of coffee. They stimulate, but don't really detoxicate.

This would all be fine - who doesn't love a good drunken stupor? - but problem is that the longer you're in a shop, the more compelled you feel to buy something, and so your ability to choose wisely is inversely proportional to your imagined need to do so. As happened yesterday when Oedipa and I took a field trip to a place where you can mix and match essential oils to create your own perfumes. We learned quite a bit - what certain notes smell like on their own (alas, no vetiver or musk were available - two of the scents we were both most curious about), how the concentration effects the fragrance of the final product (I love the texture of essential oils, but found that undiluted, they can all too often smell like air freshener).

Lucky for us, essential oils are usually much cheaper than perfume (at least at this shop they were), and so we each only paid $12. In a real perfume store, however, you needn't feel any compunction to buy anything. Like buying a car, people expect you to be careful about your purchase, to research it thoroughly, and to take several different cars on test drives. I scored 4 different Serge Lutens samples yesterday, and by this morning, I had decided I didn't love any of them.

Anyway, my final word on essential oils is that for the novice, they are perhaps best on their own, for when you really do just want to smell like a flower, or a tree or whatever. There are worse things in life than smelling uncomplicated.