Recently I have become enamored with the show "Hoarders" on A&E. This show follows the depressive self-involvement of "Intervention" and showcases its own special brand of obsessive self-involvement in the form of fecal hoarding and cat ownership. It is awesome in the way that watching other people who are worse off than yourself is therapeutic. There is a special thrill in being able to exclaim, loudly and to yourself, "Holy shit! At least I have never saved every Garfield comic strip I have come across and then bound them in a kitty litter encrusted Ziggy notebook!"
The aftereffect of getting drunk on other people's mental illness displayed in documentary form is that I am determined not to become one of them. Every episode I have watched has resulted in my purging of material possessions. The first episode I watched I collected 15 garbage bags of old clothes to donate to MRCI. Since that first episode I have gone through my linen closet, all my makeup in my makeup drawers (which is considerable since I worked for both Clinique and Lancome,) and have also gone through my extensive fragrance collection. Which brings me to the real subject of my post....fragrances of my life (wait, what?! I thought we were talking about toothless cat hoarders? Don't worry. I will write about them more later.)
After a marathon session of "Hoarders" I decided to tackle the linen closet in my apartment, which ironically has never held linens of any sort since I have moved in. It has become the defacto storage area for my large collection of fragrances that I never, ever wear. The past few years I have worn Pure Grace and Amazing Grace by Philosophy almost exclusively. I never become sick of them or experience a headache due to either of them. These fragrances are neither complicated nor sophisticated, but that is why they are great for everyday wear. But, there was a time in my life when I had a lot more disposable income and was able to wear more adventurous scents because I worked with a lot of older women who smelled of aged oak barrels and cigarette smoke disguised as high end fragrances by YSL and Givenchy. Their nostrils were so burnt out on their own fetid odor, they never noticed mine. As I was rifling through my nearly never worn fragrances , I took a trip down memory lane and also wondered why at the age of 22 I wanted to smell like a 64 year old named Marcy from St. Louis Park.
I have always been intrigued by the allure of fragrances and exotic perfumes. A lot of its appeal has to do with the marketing and the glitzy, shoulder-padded glamour of the 1980s. I was a sucker for the promise of living like Krystle Carrington and leaving a wake of perfumed odor trails behind the train of my one-shouldered Bob Mackie dress. (I was nine by the way and wore stirrup pants almost exclusively.) I felt like I had been deposited in the wrong family, on the wrong street, during the wrog time. If only people would realize how spectacularly glamourous I was , I was sure to get my due. Until then I would have to live the life in scent only.
The first fragrances I remember becoming obsessed with was my mother's Anne Kelin II and her YSL Paris. At the time there were ads running for another fragrance that featured a sexy woman spraying herself luxuriously all over from head to toe covering herself in an odor burqa. I tried this same method with the Anne Klein II and made myself and everyone around me sick. My mother made me take a bath and I realized that perfumes do not wash off so easily, especially the heavy 1980s sort. I attempted the same experiment with Paris and then tried to hide the bottle in the sandbox so the old lady would never know I took it. Perhaps I thought she would just forget she had an $80 bottle of perfume lying around somewhere. After hiding it in the sandbox I went to our swingset and proceeded to make myself dizzy from the swinging and the cloying scent of roses. My mom eventually found the perfume, complete with the nozzle clogged with sand. She was not happy. I got my just deserts as I had my first migraine at age 8.
My fascination with fashion and the world of cosmetics continued well into my pre-teens and teenage years. They were fuled by many issues of Vogue, Mademoiselle and Bazaar magazines and a coterie of gay male friends that were in my theater classes. In one of these magazines I discovered the new fragrance by Yves Saint Laurent, named Champagne. The ad featured a red backdrop and a seductive woman posing near a bottle that suspiciously looked like a bottle of champagne. The ad said the fragrance was for the "woman that sparkles." I asked for it for Christmas that year (1993) feeling like I was indeed that woman. I sparkled, I wasn't a woman, but I sure as hell sparkled (if "sparkling" was code for laughing loudly and getting in trouble for talking loudly with my neighbor during class.) And what was more sophisticated and luxurious than champagne? I got the perfume for Christmas that year and marched off to school smelling like a peach that rolled around in tobacco. How glamourous.
Champagne was not my first experience of being seduced by marketing without ever having smelled the "juice." This was the 80s after all and everything was over the top and what was more over the top than Christian Dior's Poison? The deep purple bottle vaguely shaped like a poisoned apple. The juxtaposition of the absinthe green and the purple on the packaging and the cloyingly sweet smell got me. However, there would be no reasonable excuse for a 5th grader to be wearing such a fragrance. I was doing very little seduction druing my intro to Swedish class with Mrs. Oberg, so as much as I begged for the perfume, I didn't get it. I had to settle with using my mother's. I remember trying to hide the fact that I was wearing it to school but Poison attached itself everywhere. It became firmly embedded into the plastic wrist strap of my Swatch watch so even on days I couldn't steal a drop of my mother's, I could sniff my wristband. (Speaking of Mrs. Oberg, she was the culprit of many of my headaches that year and I attribute it to her bathing in Revlon Moondrops. It was such a cheap, heavy and vomit inducing fragrance. I am convinced that even if she had worn a finer fragrance that was as dark and cloudy as Moondrops, something like Opium, I would not have had as many sick days.)
In my early 20s I continued to adorn myself with Dior's Poison, but only its flanker sister, Hynotic Poison. This truly was the poisoned apple proferred to Snow White. It was deep red and apple shaped and smelled like a delicious concotion of fruits and root beer. I was hooked. It was sultry, seductive and perfect for a young woman going to the bars in Minneapolis where the fragrance would mix with the scents of cigarette smoke, cheap beer and hairspray.
So, I was reminded of all of these fragrances as I was cleaning out my linen closet and I finally decided to give away most of them. A lot of the perfumes I have never even worn but was holding onto becasue the bottle was pretty or there was a mistaken idea that maybe someday my chemistry would "grow into them." I had to accept the fact that at age 32 Coco Mademoiselle would never smell like anything but toilet bowl cleaner on me. I gave more than 25 fragrances away and have been rediscovering old favorites. I wore Yvresse (YSL's renamed Champagne after the Champagne region in France sued him) last night to bed and Jeff asked why my room smelled like an old man at the Mayo Clinic. Not the glamourous sexiness I was going for, but perhaps he doesn't understand the complexity of the peach and vetiver notes. It figures. No one has ever understood my complexity either.
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