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.

Alissa, Part 2: The Springening

Alissa's response to my post about her:

Not surprisingly, Poison, in the 80's was the scent I liked. . . . There is a perfume I have always longed for but never had, I don't actually think it exists. But, you have made me think about it. It's primarily Honeysuckle, which is very sweet but also greener than most people think. Underneath that are smells of sweat and freshly turned earth, a slight hint of sawdust and an tiny whiff of aromatic tobacco. In my head this is what my childhood smelled like. Its the smell I wish I could leave in my wake, Southern and earthy. But, like I said it doesn't exist. Nobody else seems to long for the smells of Texas in June.

Alissa's description of Texas in June made me weep a little on the inside. Then I picked myself up and marched over to my dresser, determined to layer "Chevrefeuille," my beloved honeysuckle, with something sweaty. . . earthy. . . tobacco-y . . . . . vetiver. I will find your summery smell, Alissa! (But I still think for sweater weather, White Aoud would suit.)

Side note: chevrefeuille is the French word for "honeysuckle." To the best of my knowledge, it translates directly to "goat-leaf." How's that for romantic? Eau de Goatleaf. (P.S., I love you Toni! "Shutthedoor!" I'll be back when I have more cash!!)

Chevrefeuille is very green and fresh on the skin, but (like most Annick Goutal) disappears as quick as a warm spell in a Chicago spring. Jalaine Vetiver, by contrast, is an essential oil, and it sticks to my skin all day long and into the next morning, when it has faded to the pleasant memory of an open-air bazaar.

So I tried the Vetiver overlaid with some generous squirts of Chevrefeuille and watched them battle it out for a while. Vetiver easily won the first round, since the oil is pretty overpowering until it's dried down. During this early phase the greenness of the honeysuckle makes the oil smell just like a fresher, grassier vetiver (which is perhaps what I'm really after). But the goat-leaf came back swinging after 15 minutes, and for a second, the velvety-dirty vetiver smell brought out a delicious creaminess in the Chevrefeuille that I hadn't noticed before. With the fresh green and sweet opening of Chevrefeuille, the effect really came close, for a heartbreaking moment, to a spring day in Austin, where the same breeze brings you smells of sweat, wood, pollen, blossom, and grass.

But alas. The contrast of the dark vetiver suddenly pushes the sparkly-sweet honeysuckle note dramatically to the fore; the green disappears; and for a while the whole shebang is aggressively sweet. (I should say I don't mind this phase, but the people around me Wednesday morning appeared to mind it. A lot. Damn you Julia! Now I'm really insecure.) The drydown, though, makes the overly sweet stage worth it to me - at the end of the tunnel there's a mild, woody spiciness tempered with green sweetness, which smells for all the world to me like an old paperback book.

So, with the addition of a cedar note, this could be a breezy Austin day, complete with a visit to Half-Price Books in the late afternoon. Maybe chypre instead of vetiver. I'll keep working on it.