I stopped at the perfumerie

I’d written down some scents I wanted to try but of course didn’t have the scrap of paper along. At least one of them was from Guerlain, so I headed there. I didn’t recognize any names so I tried L’instant Magic. I liked it. Then I tried regular old L’instant and it seemed chemically. I switched back to L’instant Magic and suddenly it smelled like Play-doh. Cute bottle, but it was over.

(I read an NYT article recently where a perfume maker refused to send samples to a particular critic because “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture.” I thought that was wonderful. I would like to see someone dance about architecture. But only for like 5 minutes.)

My perfumerie is big but it doesn’t have many smaller perfume makers. They have a section of Jo Malone, which I wasn’t familiar with. Right up I should mention that I insist I won’t wear anything that smells even remotely of food, or use vanilla bathgel, for example. (I also refuse to eat food made to look like other objects, like carrots cut and curled to look like roses. Oh god… that gives me the willies.) So I don’t know why, but I tried Blue Agava and Cacao and just swooned. I’d never heard of agava before. I hoped it wasn’t some South American bean. I’ve since googled it – it’s a flower. I was lucky, too, because shops never give away samples in Germany unless you’re making a purchase, but I left with one. I also tried Vetiver, which was nice, but by then my nose had had enough. In a half hour I figure you should smell only three at most four fragrances before you hit olfactory overload.

I almost never buy perfume. Mostly I just stop in and enjoy. At home, I have Chanel no. 5 and Clinique Aromatics Elixer, both of which I love. And I can’t get away from them because my mother knows I wear them, so I have an ever-elapsing lifetime supply. I’ll buy something new if it’s drop-dead gorgeous, though. It just takes a number of tries to establish that.

Ironically enough, Jo Malone’s website says Blue Agava and Cacao is inspired by Latin music. So I guess perfume can smell about dancing.