P2YL | 60. How's your scent-life?
Finding the fragrance for the woman you are becoming
1) Anaïs Anaïs (Cacherel)
You are in your first full-time job and suddenly able to afford to buy yourself little luxuries.
Office-life is all about deadlines and targets and management-speak, but inside you yearn to lean into a softer, gentler mode.
Turning a page in Cosmopolitan you come across an image of two women, faces reflected in the glass of a dressing-table scattered with lilies and cosmetic silver.
'Anaïs Anaïs,’ you read, ‘le plus tendre des parfums.’
It’s a delicate and soulful aesthetic, but also cleverly plays to your aspirational side.
2) White Musk (The Body Shop)
You’ve grown into a young working woman with a new social set of bright young spiritual things.
Through them you become ecology-conscious. The Body Shop ethos edges itself into your field of vision.
Body’s Shop’s White Musk was an attempt to create a musk perfume using chemicals instead of animal products.
You swoon to its scent, more enveloping than the soft white floral Anaïs.
For you White Musk will always be the scent you wore during the time you met and fell in love with the man you later married.
Only one sour note: you discover White Musk leaves a bitterly chemical taste on your skin, which transfers to his lips, and yours.
3) Vol de Nuit (Guerlain)
Your husband buys you Vol de Nuit and it becomes a shared ritual in your life together.
You make a point of wearing it whenever he does one of his professionally crucial, career-decisive, check-flights.
This is so that he knows, even during his most highly demanding days you are thinking about him and saying a prayer for him whenever you catch a faint whiff of the Vol de Nuit you are wearing.
Unfortunately one of the flaws of VdN is that for all its fame and expense it doesn’t seem to last very long on your skin.
4) L'eau d'Issey (Issey Miyake)
The years accumulate. Your husband flies higher, rises professionally; but in the process is he shedding some indefinable quality?
With access to the world’s Duty Free he brings you a slim cone-shaped bottle of L’Eau d’Issey, a great favourite with all the air hostesses he tells you.
The name is a play on the word ‘Odyssey’.
Today you look back and wonder if it should have been ‘Omen’.
He leaves you for a woman with an air hostess background; perhaps one who also wore L’Eau d’Issey.
Which is why you never wear it again.
5) Vivaciously Bold (Diana Vreeland)
Out of the devastation of divorce you hang on to the tiny 1% of yourself that implores you to believe you are not done yet.
You feel the need to reinvent yourself.
Diana Vreeland, ex-Vogue editress and mistress of self-invention, becomes for a time your inspiration.
Born with plain features, a long face, a hawkish nose, she nevertheless managed to persuade the world and her hot, rich husband, that this is completely insignificant besides her sense of style and panache.
Her journalistic interest was in the woman who wanted to close a gap between the way she was and the way she wanted to be.
Vivaciously Bold is a Diana Vreeland perfume. It comes in a periodot-green bottle with a silken tassel and its pungent scent strikes like an exotic snake with jewelled eyes.
This is the new persona you need, you think.
Still in shock, you reject your past self. You go wild, do things you never would have done in Part 1 Of Your (Love?) Life.
You think this is a way to build confidence. You may be right; but later on you ask yourself, How classy was that?
6) Ô de Lancôme (Lancôme)
Gradually, the self comes through that no longer wants les petites aventures, but real, settled, mutual love and commitment.
Yet the deep dive into your femininity has enriched your knowledge: you’ve identified citrus as the common element in the fragrances you love.
‘Citrus? Then you might like Ô de Lancôme,’ suggests a morning bus-stop acquaintance.
You try it and love its fresh astringency. It hints at cleansing and purifying unwanted elements from the past.
And Part 2 Of Your (Love?) Life comes to fruition.
7) Inis (Frangrances of Ireland)
So. You’re happily ensconced in love and commitment with a good man.
Strangely, you’re now less interested in the most élite scents.
You wear a moderately priced one called Inis | the energy of the sea which you came across in the West of Ireland.
It no longer matters to you whether Inis is mentioned in Vogue.
It no longer matters to you whether it’s listed in the Michelin Guide to Perfumes if such a thing exists.
Scent has become a casual add-on to the way you feel now:
Relaxed. Content. Engrossed in getting on with the rest of your life.
💐 Moral of the story: choose an inspiring new scent for a new chapter in your life 🙋🏾♀️
🌱🍃👒
