Just go ahead and wear the perfume

On feeling worthy

I might have said this on here before, but of the five senses, the one I’m most terrified of losing is my sense of smell. I mean, it would be less than ideal not to be able to see or hear. And taste is probably a close second, except most of taste is, in fact, smell. I don’t know if it’s even possible to lose our sense of touch?

The point is, being able to smell is very important to me. In fact, I don’t even think smell should be categorized as a sense. It’s too different from the other four (or five? I don’t know, I can’t keep track). It involves different parts of our brain. Smell bypasses all the “higher order” parts of our brain. I like to think this is why smells are so hard to describe. Our relationship to smell is so much older than language. Also, what if we communicated in a language of smell? How cool would that be?

I got a really bad summer cold a few years ago. This was long before Covid, but I lost my sense of smell after that cold and it didn’t fully come back for years. You think I’m exaggerating, but I am not. I am highly aware of smells. For several years, I couldn’t smell skunk. Confession—I love the smell of skunk.

In fact, all of what I think of as the bass smells disappeared for a long time. Skunk. Flatulence. Rotten things. I have no idea why those feel like bass smells, as opposed to tenor or soprano smells. Some smells are high-pitched and shrieking. Other smells are low and vibrating. Maybe that’s some synesthesia. It’s just what makes sense to me.

Thankfully, those smells came back to me very slowly. I can smell skunk again which—I don’t care if you think it’s weird—is a source of deep joy. I will take all the bad smells.

Well, except for chemical, artificial smells. I cannot stand the smell of Dawn dish detergent. Or those plug-in air fresheners. Bounce fabric softeners are okay. There is a certain flavor of Meyer’s hand soap that is so toxic and persistent that I would consider cutting off my own hands just to get rid of the smell. By far the worst artificial smell is high-end perfume. Ugh. It smells like gasoline and not in a good way.

I do wear perfume. It comes from our local soap store and it’s a blend of lavender and patchouli. It comes in roll-on and solid form. Generally, I dab it on when I’m leaving the house to go somewhere. I’ve had people tell me I smell good, so I assume it’s a good scent. I like it, anyway.

Photo by Elly Johnson on Unsplash

For most of my life, I’ve thought of perfume as something that’s for other people. I put it on so that other people will think I smell nice. Perfume was in a category with makeup, a front and face that I display to the rest of the world.

Perfume didn’t feel compulsory in the way makeup did. Makeup was something I had to do and I never enjoyed putting it on. I can confess that I was never good at it, which might be part of why it was never enjoyable to me. Also, it just felt like a lot of work. And expensive. And, I don’t know, yuck, sitting there on my face. It required maintenance—looking in the mirror to see if my lipstick had worn off or my mascara had run. It didn’t seem particularly compatible with a carefree lifestyle.

Maybe today’s makeup is better. I don’t care. That ship has thankfully sailed. I haven’t put on makeup in any form for at least ten years. The last time I can remember wearing any makeup was my wedding and even that was minimal. I’ve gradually thrown away everything I had except for maybe some lip gloss my salon gave me for free.

Perfume, though, felt like pleasure. It smelled good and I love smell. I loved perfume in all its forms. The strawberry-scented shampoo I used when I was a teenager, which evolved into a particular brand of shampoo that might not exist anymore but also smelled very pleasing. I pick all of my ‘beauty products’ on the basis of smell alone. It’s why I use Aveda shampoo and lotion. Yes, it’s expensive, but it smells divine (especially Shampure). I can’t put it on my body if I don’t like how it smells.

The soap shop where I buy my current perfume (and soap) only uses natural scents. If it can’t be distilled down into an essential oil, you won’t find that scent in there. When I use the solid version of the lavender-patchouli perfume, it sticks around. I’ll be sitting in my writing chair the morning after I put on the perfume and the scent lingers. I’ll raise my hand to push my hair out of my face and catch that smell and even if I’m not aware of it on a conscious level, it makes me happy. It gives me a little jolt of joy and calm.

I did this enough times that it finally occurred to me, “Why don’t you put on the perfume even when you’re not going out?” Why not put the perfume on just for me? Just so when I’m writing or reading or cooking or whatever, I carry that little jolt of joy and calm around with me all the time.

I won’t lie. Even as I write that, it sounds pretentious. Fancy. Who puts on perfume just to sit around their house? A woman who wears furs and buys designer food for her cats. That kind of woman. The perfume I buy isn’t expensive. It lasts forever. It’s not wasteful and even if it was, aren’t I worth it?

Still admitting that I put on perfume just for myself to wear around the house feels, I don’t know, shameful. Extravagant. Indulgent. Which, I know—what the hell? Don’t I deserve to treat myself with extravagance? Can’t I indulge myself, even in this small way? Or, hell, can’t I indulge myself in more ways than this? What world is this that makes me feel so small and unworthy? What world is this that makes so many of us feel that way?

Fuck that, I say. Wear the perfume.