‘ENOUGH PERFUME TO KILL A HORSE’

I woke up this morning ready to rock. It is a gorgeous sunny day, we are both now on spring break, and I felt like dousing. Before I knew it, my hands had reached out for a dabbed, poured or sprayed on all of the following : on the right wrist, arm – letting the bottle just pour out in rives onto my skin and cashmered sweater sleeve: extrait de Parfum D’Hermès, both spray and cap bottle, as well as Rouge edt (oh the animalic costus! The powdered rose ylang! the sheer hyacinthine theatrical glamour of these perfumes, among my favourite of all time); on the back of the right hand, rich, oleaginous smearings of the original and always glorious Gold Amouage, housed in the 1001 Arabian Nights Scheharazade gilt bottle (at least $1000 now on eBay) – all Mysore sandalwood rose/aldehydes and honey at their apex : I felt like a Saturday morning Sultan luxuriating with my coffee in the sheets.

On the left hand: large dosages of pre-reformulation Calvin Klein Obsession For Men (with self-infused cassia cinnamon oil I bought from Saigon Cathedral some years ago – because why not), and on the left wrist; arm, and all over the rest of the sweater: my very own galbanum oil -added Must De Cartier Parfum, (it needed revitalizing); sweet, vanillic; an ambered miasma of spiced, extravagant, woozy, velvetine sirops de fleurs – as I said before leaving the house to go grocery shopping down the road to D : ‘I think I have enough perfume on to kill a horse’.

Just case you were wondering, I don’t usually wear so much scent that it can interfere with your breathing (was I slightly wheezy because of all the perfume or because of all the pollen flying around ?) – and it is probably not the best thing to be wearing chemical warfare volumes of perfume when you are about to go vegetable and meat shopping on a local shotengai where there might be other scentless and scent-sensitive human beings milling around, yet to my great surprise, the eighty year old greengrocer I know quite well – she grows a lot of the produce herself in fields down the road, she has a lemon tree behind her house and has excellent florist’s taste; I sometimes can’t resist buying flowers there as well – and her much older customer, who were garrulously chatting away when I entered the shop, immediately and visibly perked on my entrance, commenting brightly (in my English translation):

“Wow. What a wonderful smell. You smell Beautiful. Beautiful!”

(me demurring, a bit embarrassed….: er, I rather overdid it today….” )

“No, it smells wonderful. Every time you move back and forth around the shop we keep getting drifts of it” (both make beckoning motion with hands as if to want even more coming in their direction).”Have you ever had or worn or known a perfume as lovely as that?” they asked one another. “I know that I haven’t.”

I was blushing and beaming at the same time.

Having another look round, distancing myself a little bit in case they were only being polite, buying what I wanted, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” I said, trying to change the subject.

“It’s a beautiful smell, you mean” said the older woman, avidly, and I smiled to myself as I said goodbye to them, after a conversation about buying flowers (mainly chrysanthemums) for the local cemetery, apparently the tradition at this time of year; cycling away, clouds of powdery classics floating in the air behind in my wake, surprised by their elated reactions to my impulsive pungency (which, after all, I had done for myself, not for anyone else – I loved the periodic but harmonious dominance of experiencing each perfume simultaneously but at different times); pondering the fact that, as is so often the case, the cultural stereotypes we have, even the ones I undoubtedly propagate myself, such as the misbegotten idea that Japanese people hate perfume, ‘they only like watercolour lotus’ and the like – are often just complete and utter garbage.

Both women had very clearly loved all of it.