Sugar and Spice, Who Ya Calling "Nice?"

[Prequel: How I chose my first fragrance]

I’d be afraid to work with Mandy Aftel on a custom perfume lest she decide I’m precisely suited with an eau de “Piss and Vinegar.” Yet somehow when I get into the marketplace I end up with sugar and spice every time. Twice, anyway.

I figure as a maturing woman I’m allowed a wardrobe of fragrances, especially considering that my first, Versace Crystal Noir, is widely considered too intense for daytime. To find lighter choices, I mashed up one online retailer’s list of summer fragrances with OsMoz’s oriental spicies, woodies, and florals. I ended up with maybe fifteen names. Three stores carried one each, a pain because I don’t think it’s worth the extra shower if I can’t compare arms per trip. The fourth, a quality department store, expected me to ask a young Tim Gunn-type to take them out of mirrored corrals. My mall’s Perfumania, on the other hand, wasn’t intimidating, a wonder cabinet lined with hundreds of smelly jewels from low- (Britney Spears) to high-class (Chanel).

I showed the sharp Persian saleswoman my printouts and she pulled some out, one at a time as if they were diamond rings, shaking each as if it were a Snapple. I rejected two or three based on paper spurts, but offered my arms for L by Lolita Lempicka and Thierry Mugler Angel. The first hit me with a lemon and vanilla mist but faded to a pleasant light sugar with musk. Angel was a wild experience: it started like the worst cheap aftershave, set back almost immediately to a supersonic crème brulee with other notes I couldn’t identify. “Ignore the start, this will last for two or three days,” she said.

I continued to run errands as my body developed them. When Short Stack got into the car she said, “Yum! Some people smell so delicious.” She didn’t have a preference, but said the Angel included “that leaf you made me and Lola eat from the garden.” (Turned out to mean basil). After dinner, Marshall refused to vote. “Whatever you pick I’ll just associate it with you and I’m sure I’ll like it as much as I like the other one.” As with Crystal Noir, I couldn’t stop sniffing that elbow for the middle hours of the scent’s life. The Lolita arm was sweet, fading to something insipid. Certainly not me.

By morning Angel had turned to brown sugar and patchouli, though less composty than the patchoulis I recall on hippies at school. Vanilla and musk remained on my clothes. I would be jazzed to own a Mugler at last; their perfumer is the brain behind the limited edition coffret that accompanied the movie of Patrick Suskind’s “Perfume,” my favorite crossover trashy novel. So, SOLD.

Why do I keep going for things that smell like cake? I am so not sweet. Perhaps “cloying” describes me? (I do wish to be liked.) Does the metaphor have to fit, or am I being a fragrance newbie? Is it because men’s most sexual scent association is with Cinnabon, which is classified oriental spicy? (Am I a man? I sure smell like a girl now).

Keep your nose tuned: I’ll start shopping for a third after this Visa bill is paid.

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Here’s the official description of Thierry Mugler Angel:

• top notes of fruits, dewberry, helonial, and honey
• middle notes of chocolate, caramel, and coumarin [the active ingredient in coumadin!]
• base notes of vanilla and patchouli.

And of Versace Crystal Noir:

• top note, “headspace” of gardenia [not the flower, but the air scented by the flower – a magical and suspicious description]
• middle notes of peony and orange blossom
• base notes of amber, musk and sandalwood.

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Dating Episode 0 [Summer 2007]: My Elbow Was a Delicious Cake

We went around the circle in grieving group. What happened in your life this week? I was all a-giggle. “I BOUGHT PERFUME! Here smell this!” I oozed manically, extending my cleavage to Viv.

I’d never bought a perfume before. Sure, I used to wear sandalwood or musk oil, smearing it through my hair before martial arts class. But I’d always been skeptical that the marketplace could come up with a fragrance that really suited me, me, me, and it seemed that every perfume I tried smelled like my Grandma, mostly half-rotten lilies, at least on me.

I had lost a man. I had a child, a job, and a graduate degree. Maybe I could admit I was a woman in the marketplace – the perfume market at least. I could, I thought, settle on a single product, or two or five, and let go of my artists’ dream of inventing my perfect personal fragrance (which might take till after my death). Maturity meant dealing with reality and the limits of the mere 1,000 fragrances that are manufactured commercially. Enough perfectionism, let’s dance.

I asked girlfriends how they had selected:
“My friend who picks my haircolor told me what to buy… and ze men love it.”
“I’ve always worn White Shoulders, I don’t know why.”
“I had a hip aunt who wore this and I wanted to smell like her.”
“My grandmother told me Chanel means you’re classy.”

It was not useful and I was scared of the lilies. Then one week I sat so close to a cute Jewish lesbian at church that I joked I could smell her perfume. (Yes, it was a flirt, but given my state, she would know I was not serious). She said, oh, do you like it? She schooled me about the fragrance families. Yes, of course I like vanilla, musk, woods, spices. Must be an Oriental amber.

Tried several at the MegaBeauty on the way in to work each day. They were all so powdery – it was just wrong -- I am not a dry person in any sense of the word. Sniffed around and decided Oriental Spicy for sure.

Opium smelled fantastic at first but faded to a soft smell of Gillette shaving cream, definitely not what I was after. Went through 10 more, at least, many of which completely disintegrated on my skin.

But I fell in love with my own arm the first day of Versace Crystal Noir. “Oh man,” I told Emma, “I smell like a cake, HERE” – a vanilla cake made mostly of gardenias. Gavin and I had honeymooned in Oaxaca where they sold gardenias from the zocalo for a peso, there were always some in the room. Each day I stopped at the store and respritzed; I couldn’t stop sniffing the crook of my elbow. And it got better, peppery and floral with none of that old-lady lilyness I so abhor. Faded to something that was still seductive, even to myself. While I was sniffing I noticed, hmmmm… that arm tans rather beautifully, and has a little tone left in it… and oh the other one. Quel arm! Nice.

Sixty bucks later it was mine and I was its.

I’m pretty sure that was when I started to think of myself as a single woman and not so much as a widow. All of a sudden there were men in the streets, and in cars, and even in meetings with clients. They looked at me. I looked for empty ring fingers. (How strange to be on the make after 15 years.) Friends said, “you look great, have you lost weight?” and “what a great haircut.”

It would be another 5 or 6 months before I had my hands full of flesh, but now I was moving through air that had been charged. It wasn’t just the “aerial notes” and “headspace of gardenias” (with a touch of clove and vanilla) but those were a constant subconscious reminder of where I was and where I was headed, if slowly.

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