Smell Memory #1: Horses

I have been a little bit out of the perfume loop lately, so I'm going to post on some smell memories to get back into the habit of posting!

I grew up in a semi-rural part of Florida, where the outskirts of the Tampa suburbs met the outskirts of West Pasco dairy farms. Lots of my neighbors owned livestock. The most precious of these, to my young feminine mind, were the horses. When I was around 7 years old, our babysitter was this teenager from the neighborhood who would ride up to our house on a beautiful, kind, brown horse, complete with a white star on its forehead. She would let my sister and me pet the horse as much as we pleased while she chatted with Andy, our hottt Finnish exchange student.

My favorite part of the horse, besides its impossibly soft nose, was its wonderful smell. I have never been able to get anyone to agree with me on this, but horses smell delicious. It's a dirty smell, but an deeply satifying one. It's akin to the way your body smells just after you work out, before the sweat has a chance to get stale, and your body just smells live and wet. Then there's the fine dust that settles on the horse's coat - the dust they kick up when they run on coastal Florida's sandy terrain. It adds a silky fizz to the moist, squishy sensuality of the skin smell. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. You might say that horses smell...envaginated. After all, isn't the horse the typical object of young feminine desire? Don't all little heteronormative girls want them? So elegant, so expensive. Those long manes and tails you could french-braid all day! The round apple-bottoms and shapely legs! The princess associations!

But horses are also scary. A tussle with one will kill you. Even ponies are not really to be trifled with. After all, when ridden by a cowboy, a horse is one of the ultimate symbols of renegade masculinity. Bucking broncos, wild horses, endless miles of sheep herding, riding off into the sunset. Even Mr. Ed was, ahem, a dude. Horses are living proof of gender double standards, not that we really need living proof, since proof is all around, all the time. But the nature of a horse changes based on the gender of the person who wants/owns it. They're girly and silly when desired by little girls (I want a pony for Christmas); elegant and beautiful when owned by young women (my babysitter's horse); and useful and strong when owned by men (his trusty steed). Taking this to its literal extreme, illustrations in medieval French romances would depict horse and rider, with the horse's (male) genitalia sized to match the masculinity of the rider (thanks, Emmanuelle)!

Anyway, back to the smell of a horse, which is likewise genderiffic. Peeking through that impeccably powdered vagina is the unmistakable scent of oranges just past their peak, still delicious, but harboring a passive-aggressive hint of decay. You've neglected us for much too long, those aging oranges seem to chide, as they apply $100 moisturizer to their drying peels, and you gaze surreptitiously at the pert clementines that still swing from the branches of the neighbor's grove.

Of course, the smell of leather - auxilliary, but sexy and caddish as always - is not to be forgotten. That smoldering saddle sidles up to you, slick as the seashore, and smoothly cops a feel, only to stick uncomfortably to the backs of your thighs if you mistake that one-night stand for endless love.

When you pet a horse, it's not just the scent of horse that gets all over you - it's also the perfumed dust that lays obediently on the surface, like talcum, waiting to turn anything it touches to silk. You pet a horse, and your hands become as fragrant and soft as the horse's nose.

The Smell of Lies

Perfume is ideology in a bottle. Synthetic aromachemicals are mixed in a lab to mimic the smell of plants that grow in sub-Saharan Africa. They are then suspended in an artifically tinted alcoholic solvent, sealed in expensive-looking bottles, photographed next to Eva Green's breasts and marketed in the glossy pages of Elle magazine between an article about plastic surgery and one about loving yourself exactly the way you are. Even as you spray it on your forearm, you know perfume is made of lies, and that its insistence that women smell of iris and ylang-ylang rather than flesh and blood is doing women no better service than your average douche commercial.

But God in heaven above knows that without perfume and the escapism it affords, I might not have survived the past month and a half. If I have to shampoo with Shalimar and shoot up with Songes, I will make it through the next couple of days. Falling asleep on scented pillows, I dream I'm already gone with the wind. And if I have to lie, cheat, still or kill, as God is my witness, when this move is over, I'll never go smelly again.

Dark Twin Scents

It is my theory that every good smell has a secret grossness to it. You get a whiff of something, and you just want to smell it more and more intensely, but there's always a dark side of the smell that increases in proportion to the good side of the smell. When you hate something, sometimes you're really hating its dark twin; when you like something, it's because you have a tolerance for the dark twin, or even a fascination. Dark twins make ordinary smells more interesting.

I am learning to tell the flowers in Songes apart based on their various indolic dark twin smells. When I douse myself in Songes (nightly!), I get a burst of ylang-ylang first, which reeks in a banana-y way. Next comes the big, heavy-hitting jasmine, accompanied by a rubber balloon smell that I unaccountably loooooooove. (Ligustrum smells similar, but disgusting - more like the stale air exhaled from a used birthday party balloon. My parents' back yard is full of ligustrum bushes.) Last of all, before the drydown, the frangipani takes over. Its dark twin is bubblegum.

After sampling Estee Lauder's Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia a while back, I think I have identified the dark twin of tuberose. I've sniffed around some gardenia frags, and even though I'm not sure what gardenia smells like, I'm pretty sure it doesn't make me gag. So I think it's the tuberose that has a dark twin of stale, warm 7up, like someone is breathing on you after drinking stale 7up. I wanted to like PCTG, I really did; it was pretty and elegant and whatnot; but smelling it felt like swimming through a patch of suspiciously warm water in the local pool: "Oh, that's nice - hey wait a minute, gross!" (Grimaces in disgust.)

Annick Goutal, Les Nuits d'Hadrien, Eau d'Hadrien

Summer scents from my Annick Goutal haul.

Eau d'Hadrien: Lemon Pledge comes to mind, which brings back wonderful memories of dusting my great-grandmother's piano but is not entirely desireable on the skin. A hint of grass somewhere in the drydown, but it still smells a bit too much like fruit-loops.

Les Nuits d'Hadrien: When I want to smell like a dude, this is the dude I want to smell like. The bitter orange peel note - bergamot? I still don't really know what bergamot is - accompanies a slightly aggressive oakmoss, which then dries down to mild spices. A light, brisk, pleasantly acidic cologne that doesn't take itself too seriously, plus the bottle matches my hair.

Of course neither of these last longer than a heartbeat, but maybe in the middle of the summer reapplying throughout the day will feel refreshing rather than annoying.

Serge Lutens, Sa Majesté La Rose & Miel de Bois

Miel de Bois and Sa Majesté La Rose are like gourmet comfort foods. Both start out as good examples of highly recognizable, traditional scents (cathedral incense, rose), with a twist (honey, nutmeg). The nutmeg-rose combo is especially lovely - the hint of spice suffuses the rose rather than peeking forward from its petals. It's a soft, absorbent spice, not a sharp, bright one. Spice cake, maybe. I don't love the honey - it remains too separate from the incense and seems like an afterthought.

Eventually, both perfumes fade back into their traditional forms, until they might as well be essential oils. The drydowns are like that hot guy at your college who played guitar in an indie-rock band and studied abroad in South Africa for a semester. Years later, you learned that he had settled down with a consulting job and a family and a loft and was pulling a solid 6 figures. The rose drydown especially has that complacent knowledge of how comfortable and bright its future will be.

Rose is the one fragrance that can handle powder (usually powder resides in that geriatric Chanel No. 5 territory). I love the powder-musk drydown of a good rose. I love it. The drydown of the Miel de Bois is less pleasant - as the honey fades completely, the incense has a little while sit on its own before it turns from the vast, smoky, wood and stone combo of my catechised youth, into something brighter, coniferous. There's a hint of cheap sport in the later drydown, of that juniper, locker-room aroma of Irish Spring Soap and men's shaving lotion, as if our hero had to downgrade from a chic urban loft to a bungalow in Jersey.

Pilar and Lucy, tiptoing through chambers of the moon

It should be fairly clear by now that I am easily seduced by names. The more fantastic the promise, the more snake oil I am likely to buy.

Alas, this Pilar and Lucy scent only lived up to the "tiptoing" part of its name. Its pretty, inoffensive floral note creeps in on little cat feet of powdery musk and then is gone before you know it. Wearing it out, I had difficulty believing, as the promo materials claim, that I was being "romanced under a moonlit night with the faint scent of a tuberose garden lingering somewhere near." Bad writing aside (the website also urges us to "trust our surrender"), the description is just wrong. The tuberose garden is indeed somewhere near, but it's not nighttime - it's seven o'clock in the morning and I'm fresh out of the shower, catching a moment to myself in the breakfast room before the kids are out of bed.

Unlike "Perfect Veil," this scent does call a real woman to mind, an admirable one in fact. She is one of those sensible women who eat healthy food, meditate, and raise competent children. I picture a well-appointed Regency-era interior in cornflower blue, with Elinor Dashwood carrying on her polite correspondence at a writing table. It's a steady, sober, practical, powdery-soft kind of feminine smell, suitable for reflecting on one's virtues but not one's sins.

In other words, not for me. For some women, this scent is probably wonderfully calming, like L'Heure Bleue, the Guerlain classic that also doesn't suit me in the slightest. For me, it is a cage of stillness. Like yoga, it just reminds me that I feel most alive when in motion, and most relaxed when I'm asleep.

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.

Creative Scentualization, Perfect Veil

Apparently this scent is supposed to replicate the smell of skin, whatever that means. I mean, the idea of wearing a skin-scented perfume on your own skin is almost kind of Hannibal Lector-ish in a way, isn't it? But hey, I like skin. I'm intriqued.

So I dab it on. There's some clean, gentle musk. There's some whitewashed vanilla. There's a whisper of peach in the opening, the barest hint of an anonymous flower in the heart. On one of my wrists I'm smelling sandalwood. No wait, that's yesterday's Vetiver.

My first thought was the nursery, but this would be an infant that never once howled with rage or pooped its jammies. (For the real thing, check out Petite Cherie.) This scent is so . . . passive. Like it's sitting in an easy chair in a scrupulously maintained nursing home where the smell of antiseptic has been expertly masked by the softest air fresheners.

This is society's collective fantasy of what women should smell like: completely free of experience, devoid of all signs of life. It's skin that never sweats, never ages, never reeks of lovemaking or garlic or gasoline. It is, in fact, perfect. "Perfect Veil" is therefore the perfect name for this profoundly ideological fragrance.

Ugh, I'm going to go douse myself in Vetiver now.

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.

LesNEZ, The Unicorn Spell

I learn from other reviews that The Unicorn Spell is a violet scent, and so I infer that violets are a flower I may never get along with. It is undeniably pretty, but so cold it makes my sinuses ache. Green, with scarcely a hint of the warmth you associate with a flower; so astringent that if my nose could pucker, it would. These violet blossoms are tiny and pale and close to the ground, as if they bloomed too early in the spring and had to weather a lot of chilly nights. On the skin, soft woods begin to embellish and warm the scent after half an hour; but the violet note, almost metallic to my nose, hangs on much longer; then the whole thing vanishes into oblivion, just as a hint of vanilla begins to pull the scent off-center.

If Magical Moon is about moon goddesses, The Unicorn Spell is about the actual moon - cold, astral, eerily distant in the night sky. Think of keeping a silver locket in the freezer for a week, then pulling it out and wearing it around your neck.

Update, later same day: After wearing Kenzo Amour out today, I've relented a little on The Unicorn Spell. Now I think that my opinion was based largely on resentment at our recent cold rainy snap (Chicago spring, grr!). In warm weather when I need less comfort from my fragrance this might be easier to wear. And I'm thinking of a friend who is tall, graceful, and very reserved - Marie - who could probably pull it off at any time of the year.

Montale, White Aoud

In my freshman logic class at UT, there was a girl in the back of the auditorium who always raised her hand, and who, when called on, spoke in a disconcertingly loud voice. This girl wore broomstick velvet skirts with denim vests; fedoras and other rakishly masculine millinery; and round glasses that she squinted through owlishly. This girl, who quickly earned herself the usual monikers that loud, intelligent women accumulate in their wake (cf. Hilary Clinton), was Alissa.

Around the time she took off her glasses to reveal eyes of startlingly childlike blue and showed me a poem she'd written that knocked my socks off, Alissa and I became friends. The rest is history. When trying to come up with a perfume for Alissa, I have been stumped by the odd assortment of characteristics that she represents in my imagination: feminine, even womanly, but not sweet; hippie-ish, but not in a patchouli-wearing way; witchy, but not dark; both extremely warm and extremely reserved. Creative, yet analytical; both generous and stern; also a little reckless in her finer moments. Brave, bold, shy, kind.

Quite possibly the scent that best represents her comes from the squadron of 80s power perfumes, those conversation-halting Poisons and Shalimars with which I have little experience. Probably Alissa's mom wore something along these lines. But for Alissa, I had been hoping to sniff out something a bit more mystical, something with witchy ingredients gathered at midnight on the vernal equinox. That type of thing.

I had high hopes for LesNEZ's The Unicorn Spell, a violet scent that is plenty mystical enough. But somehow the nose-tingling reserve of the first hour, when the violet is just barely green and cold cold cold, brought to mind the wrong Alissa. It evoked her steely qualities, the icy strength with which she scythes her enemies to the ground. But that was Alissa in a bad mood.

For Alissa in a good mood, I am settling on White Aoud by Montale. Aoud, otherwise known as agarwood, is one of those deep dark gritty notes that evokes a Middle Eastern trade route, camels and all. From what I've heard, many of the offerings in Montale's aoud line can knock birds out of the sky at thirty paces. It's not a wussy note. When aoud is first unleashed in a perfume it has a dense acrid smell, almost like medical bandages. But in White Aoud, a complex of floral notes - rose, saffron, jasmine - keeps the opening lighter and more delicate, almost powdery. Sandalwood softens, a hint of leather and a hint of vanilla make the drydown comforting rather than disturbing. The astringent note never leaves entirely - Alissa in her best mood is still rather tart - but White Aoud is deeply feminine, even refined despite its earthiness; it smells old-fashioned to me.

But just like that girl in my logic class and the lawyer she grew up to be, it packs a punch.

Oscar de la Renta, Oscar

Sometimes you invent an imaginary woman to wear a fragrance. Sometimes the woman already exists. And sometimes, the woman already exists AND she already wears that fragrance. I know, I know, Ouroboros, history and associations, blah blah blah. But such is the relation between my mother and Oscar. It is written in the stars and in the TJ Maxx inventories.

Just as your mother is probably the single most important woman in your life, her perfume probably struck your child-self as the essence of adulthood and authority. My mother was not a woman to be disobeyed or trifled with. In her glory days, she was like a Nagel print: mass-produced elegance personified, the unabashedly expensive kind, and she threw her class in people's faces like so much prime rib in the face of a starving refugee. But it was the 80s, and she had her own career and was married to an MD (even if he technically worked as a public health administrator). She had paid her dues, in cash (or check if she happened to be at the grocery store), many times over, so it wasn't so unusual to be loudly announced by the clatter of a couple of solid gold bangles, half an inch wide, every time she entered a room. She always looked beautiful, always wore leather shoes and real jewelery. And she owned a fur coat. A good one. In Florida. Her style commanded the respect she deserved as a woman of class, substance, and fortitude. After all, she had come to this country with nothing, put herself through nursing school, and mothered 3 children. She worked 12-hour shifts in the Critical Care Unit of a corrupt hospital in a corrupt healthcare system.

Rooms away, we kids knew when she was finished dressing - that heavy, amber floral, deep and powdery, would fill the bathroom and seethe through the house, occupying every blanket-fortress, penetrating every last pillowcase gas-mask. In the car, it was a massacre. Nobody even had a chance. Eyes watered, throats seized, and any daughterly impulse to cuddle against her pretty silk blouses and coiffed hair was thwarted yards ahead of time.

Now, such aggressive hauteur is out of style, and they sell Oscar and his "don't even think about it" allure at Target. I still don't like it, but I'm used to it by now; I'm much older and bigger, and I can kind of ignore it. However, sometimes, when I'm visiting and there's some event, she'll do her hair and slug me with full-on, floral bitchface, just for old time's sake, and to prove she's still got it.

She does.

Sillage

Sillage (see-YAZH) is French for "wake," as in the wake of a boat on the water. In perfume jargon, sillage is the trail of scent a fragrance leaves behind you, the effect of the molecules evaporating from your body into the surrounding air, pushing that air aside, creating ripples, as you sail through your business.

I like this word for how similar it is to "silly" - really, it's a gussied-up nominalization of "silly." Instead of "silliness" (or "smell," for that matter), ladies have "sillage." Also, we never sweat; we glow.

I will toast to fancy silliness any day. I will also toast to an Annick Goutal fragrance that doesn't flatline after 10 minutes (this is not the fault of your exausted olfaction, Oedipa)! Even my old Elizabeth Arden Green Tea body spray hangs around longer than that. Hell, even soap lasts longer.

Duel, scent of my soul, stay a while!
Sailors. Pfft.

Annick Goutal, Petite Cherie

Petite Cherie - the name alone is pretty awful. I knew it wasn't going to be my cup of tea. But it came in the mini trio with Songes and Grand Amour (about which more later), and so I thought I'd give it a try. Pear and peach and fresh-cut grass doesn't sound bad, though the description on the AG website of the "naive and determined woman-child" for whom the scent was intended put me off a little. But hell, I like Magical Moon! If that's not naive and determined, I don't know what is.

For the first half-hour, Petite Cherie smells like a thirteen-year-old wearing Love's Baby Soft and smoking a cigarette behind the drug store. It actually conjured up memories of my "bad" friend in junior high, and if that doesn't sound so terrible to you, keep in mind that a) the drugstore was in Naperville, Illinois, in the mid-80s, and b) even she has probably moved on to something a mite classier by now. (Oh, I really miss her sometimes. We used to play with ouiji boards and put on slutty makeup together. Wonder where she is now.)

The bitter, smoky note I smell - musk rose? cut grass? - is the only interesting thing about this otherwise pallid fragrance, but as I say, there was such a gulf between the watery peach and pear topnotes and whatever I was smelling underneath that it had the effect of stale cigarette smoke lingering on the clothes of a freshly shampooed teenager. That smoky note calms in the drydown, leaving a smell that reminds me of . . . a diaper-changing table. All those sweet-smelling powders and air fresheners tinged with a note of acrid plastic and a distant aura of baby poop.

Maybe Petite Cherie will layer up with some other AG fragrances. I will try. Apparently AG really did create it to evoke childhood, and it certainly lives up to that promise. On some less aggro woman than me that may be a good thing.

Annick Goutal, Songes

A woman spends the evening of her thirtieth birthday sitting on the back porch with a glass of red wine in her hand. Stirred by a breeze she can barely feel, a heavy bough from the neighbor's frangipani tree sways over the fence, its bluish-white blossoms floating against a background of rustling leaves. Their heady scent with its barely persceptible rankness takes her breath away for a moment; then the warm air settles around her again and only a faint thick sweetness remains. The deck chair sends up a metallic tang along with a rhythmic creak; she must have been bobbing her foot restlessly for some time now.

She takes a sip of the cabernet and feels its bitter fur mellowing to a vanillic softness around her tongue. There was a time when she professed not to abide the scent of fresh flowers, but those too-clever days are mostly in the past. The greyish-green of the trees is becoming indistinguishable from the greyish-brown of the wood fence, and soon she won't be able to see the frangipani tree, just smell it, along with those night-blooming white flowers that line the driveway.

Her kitchen light is starting to feel warm on her back, and she enjoys wanting to stay out and go in at the same time. But whatever used to seem mysterious to her about the dusk is now just another part of her, and she doesn't need to be outside to feel it. The wine glass clinks against the chair as she rises to go in.

Annike Goutal, Duel

She's got a date with the queen of the rodeo, but after pitching hay and herding cattle all day, there are grass stains on her jeans, divots caked in her boots, and sweat in her hat. Musty-sweet horse-smell has penetrated her clothes right down to her longjohns, and her shirt...well, she should change her shirt.

But she cleans up real nice, and the sharp, caustic soap she uses will lather it up and pull it all down, slipping like a bride's silken chemise down her back, down her legs, and pooling at her small, rough toes at it swirls down, down the shower drain, leaving her with a sharp, hybrid aura - clean and dirt, soap and the faintest glow of grassy sweat, a soft, spicy incense no bath can banish. The aroma subsides into a deep green fog as she towels off, like the distant, transparent mountains on a summer evening.

Curls in place, smile bright, belt, hat, boots, and she's off to sip raspberry phosphates with the prettiest queen in the West.

L'Artisan Parfumeur Mure et Musc

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, dammit. So the pie crust was a total disaster, and there's flour and sugar everywhere, and the cat licked the bejeezus out of that stick of butter. You still have a bowl of fresh, ripe blackberries, and no one can take that away from you. It's not that you're naive, or in wilful denial, or that you don't appreciate the complexity of more exotic desserts. You're just tough as nails, and you haven't got patience for regret. Who could really begrudge you that stalwart optimism to which you've pledged yourself, come hell or high water? Who could dislike the eagerness and flexibility that takes you from day to night in a split second flat because you didn't realize it had gotten dark outside? Some big jerk, that's who, and he'd be wrong anyway. Well, maybe you're in a little bit of wilful denial. But dammit, a little of that is probably healthy.

Issey Miyake L'Eau d'Issey

The new librarian in the rare books collection recommends the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales to all new visitors; It's a one-of-a-kind, handwritten by medieval clerics, etc, and it's one of the oldest books in the library. But her favorite edition is actually by the Kelmscott Press. It's a Nouveau fantasy: all twisting branches and plentiful draping. A bright floral heightened by a touch of lemon zest, tamped down by centuries of creeping moss and thick roots, finally yellowed to a fine, acrid glow, wafting off the page.

The art of aging beautifully, she muses, is all in one's demeanor. Retain a bearing of monastic elegance and you can never go wrong... even if it means tightly confining those fructiferous tendrils of flora to the unyielding grains of a woodblock. But wood does yield, and that warm, oak edge left a print that softly combines the best of the wilderness and the worktable, together, in love, at last.

Hanae Mori Magical Moon

Two girls are dancing by a bonfire under a full moon to the jingle of tambourines and the light smacking of drums. The taller girl has a bright young smell, litchee as sharp as a newly-minted penny and sweet coconut milk. As her long skirt swishes around her calves, she gazes longingly at her more experienced friend, a voluptuous hippie in a wench costume men will be dreaming about tonight, swaying slowly back and forth in a cloud of patchouli and sandalwood. If only men looked at her like that.

Just as she is getting tired of it, someone taps her on the shoulder. She turns around to behold a long-haired, gangly youth in a doublet. He kneels and offers her a rose. "For the mistress of my heart." She takes the rose, but she's glad she can't see him too well in the firelight - he's probably just that guy from the dorm who plays World of Warcraft all day long.

She lies in her sleeping bag that night, peering into the dark blue vial of oil she borrowed from her friend. It's dank and dirty but a hint of soapy white musk lies at the bottom like a jovial wink. The fire has died and a sweet smell of burning leaves is curling up toward the moon. She can just barely smell the rose wilting where she dropped it outside the tent. Sigh. No matter what she does or who she sleeps with, she is always going to have that little milky white heart that smells like innocence, for better or for worse.

She rolls over and goes to sleep with vanilla on her mind.

Max Mara le Parfum

A tomboy on her wedding day. Today of all days in her life she's determined to do the girly thing, but as with many of her experiments, she may have overdone it. An invigorating burst of pink pepper fades to reveal optimistic lime (it's a summer wedding) and nutmeg, like coltish limbs akimbo under poofy pink tulle. Giddy with excitement and a little scared, she can't stop looking at her image in the mirror and marveling that it's really her. In fact, by the end of the day, she'll have a headache from pink champagne and will relish scrubbing off the makeup. Back to Eau d'Issey for an active honeymoon, thank God, and they might not keep the wedding pictures on the mantle. They're beautiful but a little too much.