How Perfume Changed My Life

by Joanna McLaughlin

Most people I know well are shocked to find out that I like perfume. I guess my lifestyle was such that perfume would not have seem to fit. I found the reaction to my new infatuation with things scented to range from mild disbelief ("I had no idea you liked perfume") to profound skepticism ("I find it hard to believe you would spend money on perfume") to even mild anger ("What's with all this perfume stuff? What's wrong with you?") I knew right about then that I was onto something. Something big.

The funny thing is that I remember liking perfume. As a little girl, I can remember that my mother wore a perfume called Tweed and another one called Evening in Paris, that came in a shocking blue bottle. I know shocking blue isn't a color, but that's how the bottle looked to me. It was bluer than things normally were. Once, when she ordered some stuff from a friend of hers who was having a home party, I got a plastic container shaped like a daisy full of some kind of scent.

Of course, my mother wasn't a true perfume person, either. She worked, but in my dad's business, which involved a lot of blue collar activities like painting and lifting stuff and being a dusty big shop. But the thing that impressed me was that, in the secret life of every woman, was a bottle of perfume.

She actually had pretty good taste in perfume. She loved a scent called Nuit de Noel, which she knew meant Christmas Night although she was no linguist. Years later, she would send me to France (I was a linguist, you see) and I brought her home a bottle. It came in an intriguing container. It was a tiny black bottle that came in a dark paper box. It was not the ordinary stuff of Christmas presents.

Growing up, I can remember loving Muguet de Bois, a lily of the valley scent, and some kind of fragrant products called Love. I also remember Jean Nate, just oceans of it.

Sometime in my teen years, I developed pretty bad allergies. The medical term for what I had is allergic rhinitis (today I'm a medical writer, having abandoned linguistic work). I sneeze. My eyes water and itch. I had always had allergies, to some extent, having been born into a family of allergic individuals.

The funny thing about allergies is that they aren't specific. You can be allergic to one thing for a time period and then allergic to something else later on. Allergies can be familial (hereditary) but they don't have to be similar. My aunt was violently allergic to apple blossoms; my grandmother was allergic to ragweed; I have a cousin who is violently allergic to potato skins.

I went for allergy tests a few times in my life but it was in my teen years that the allergies I had became overwhelming. A complex series of test showed I was literally allergic to everything for which I was tested, except horses, and I am scared of horses. Dogs, cats, roses, grass, hay, seafood, strawberries, oak trees, anything you could test, I was allergic to, except, of course, horses.

I began taking allergy shots, two a week, a treatment I pursued for about four years. I also took allergy pills, which made me sleepy, and most of the time, I just endured. My eyes ran. I can remember taking a geometry exam with my nose running so badly that I stuffed half a box of tissues into a bandanna and tied it around my face so my nose could drip all it wanted as I took the test.

Interestingly, the adults in my life did not intervene. Parents and teachers were inclined to let children take geometry tests with bandannas tied to their faces. It was in this period that I lost my desire to perfume myself.

Actually, I was pretty jubilant just to get through childhood. In college, I went on a junior year abroad to Munich and ended up staying two more years. During that time, my allergies waned considerably and I discovered 4711, the original cologne. It's a light, citrus cologne that I happened to love (and still do), although in European society, it is a scent associated with old ladies, or so I was told.

When I came back to the U.S. I had a normal life, married, divorced, working here, working there. I lived in Texas and California mostly. And a lot of the time, I had allergies. Not enough to cripple me, not even enough to send me to the doctor, but enough that I walked through life smell-blind. It was probably the way it is for folks who are color-blind. You can manage to get through life, but you're missing something.

Then in February 2007, something remarkable happened. I got undeniably sick and, since it was tough to pinpoint what was going on, I ended up seeing a bunch of doctors. You know how doctors like to introduce you to their friends. If you have a health problem and one doctor, it's not long before you have six more doctors and then six more health problems.

One of the doctors was an allergist. Granted, I ended up taking a lot of pills. I think for a while I was taking 6 meds a day to get my condition under control (I had a respiratory infection, bronchial inflammation, viral asthma, as well as allergies). Treatment involved taking meds and gradually getting off some of them, but a few are still in the medicine chest and one, in particular, I'll probably be taking forever.

But here's the amazing part. My allergies went away. Sometime between my teenage years spent on allergy shots (in the 1970s) and an allergy regiment over 30 years later, I got 99% cured.

One morning, I woke up with an eerie senstation. I could breathe through my nose. Over the years with my allergies, I had learned to sleep practically sitting up. It took eight pillows on my bed to do it, but that's how I slept. I breathed through my mouth. I woke up during the night sneezing and coughing.

Now I woke up after a sound night's sleep--breathing through my nose.

I've heard stories about people who were born blind or who went blind in childhood who suddenly had surgery that enabled them to see again. I've heard about deaf people who get an implant and suddenly can hear. For me, the experience was on the same par but, of course, no body talks so poetically about smell.

Suddenly, scents mattered. I could smell again. I could breathe through my nose. I headed for the perfume counter.

I was interested in retro-scents, I suppose, the same way a blind person wants to see some of the things from a long-ago childhood. I was interested in new scents, because I had missed a lifetime of perfume. I headed to the perfume counter.

Of course, I bought Evening in Paris (you can get it at the Vermont Country Store, of all places; it's not easy to find). I tried Youth Dew at a department store (hated it at first, now own it and like it but don't use it much). I remembered Chanel No. 5 from my childhood as being a harsh scent, something that pierced me with a headache, but now I realize that must have been my mother's cigarette smoke or other aromas from childhood. When the lady at the perfume counter let me smell No. 5 I almost fell over.

It was exquisite. It was beautiful. There weren't words for it. It was so profoundly wonderful, how all those different sparkles or flashes of aromas could dance around together out of the bottle. It wasn't harsh at all, not how I remembered it, in fact, it was like silk or scented water bubbling up out of a spa.

It was a life-changing experience. Once I had no smell, now I could smell.

I told a friend how I went to the perfume counter to get Chanel No. 5 and how I remembered it as a harsh, biting kind of scent, and I found out it was the most wonderful, luscious, delicious, glorious thing I had ever smelled. She mused that perhaps age or hormones or the passage of times changes our sense of smell. I think there's something to it, but for me, it was an epiphany.

It's like being 50 years old and finding out you missed out on a whole portion of life for half a century.

The first perfume I bought was a silly little perfume, Curious by Brittney Spears. I bought it at a drug store, because I wasn't even really sure how a person went about buying perfume. From there, I graduated to department stores. I started buying Vogue and Elle and other fat magazines for the perfume samples. Then came the websites.

One day, I sent away for the Bon Bon package from Bond No. 9, a boutique perfumery in New York City. Around this time, I started talking about my perfume interests. A coworker was very excited and even became a partner on my forays into department stores.

Then I found some ladies at my church who loved perfume and were eager to try on new scents. Even a lady at a coffee stand, making idle conversation, got suddenly passionate when talking about perfume. (Her favorite: Obsession, but she admitted it was a classic, not one of those new scents.)

My mission is quite simple: to try every perfume worth trying, to sniff every great scent possible, and to own as many products as necessary to live out my new lifestye.

Around this time, it occurred to me that I was wearing clothes that clashed with my perfume. Wardrobe got upgraded.

Then it occurred to me that my old look, which minimalized make-up (primarily because I had such itchy, watery eyes anyway) had to go. A perfumista wears cosmetics, particularly lipstick.

I'm still shopping for the sunglasses (white frames, only, please) and a scarf. For some reason, I think a perfumista ought to have a scarf. In truth, I have a few scarves already, but I don't have any designer stuff. A perfumista does not wear a scarf from the Dollar Store.

I now want to lose weight. To write websites. To share my perfume discoveries with friends. I need to train my nose better. I can't pick out scents sometimes, and there are some scents, like colors, that I can perceive but can't name and can't even really describe. I plan on writing books.

It's all inspiration, which just means breathing in. Breathe in the perfume!

<take me back to BASICS>