About once a year, I decide it’s time for me to “get into” perfume. The thought that it’s time to “get into” perfume has only gotten more persistent now that most of my old indulgences (alcohol, pizza, nice cheese) are forbidden to me. Like… what’s my dumb indulgence, now that I can’t spend money I don’t have on new kinds of gin? Am I just supposed to… not spend money I don’t have?
But the list of non-food-based indulgences is slim pickings. Anything really indulgent when it comes to bedding and towels is unaffordable (and anyway, I don’t need either). Clothes are great, of course, but the shipping on Poshmark and TheRealReal adds up fast. I don’t really wear makeup (aside from lipstick, sometimes), nail polish is tedious, and there’s a limit to how much Coke Zero even I can drink. Thus, perfume.
And I feel like I should like wearing perfume.1 In my mind, it’s like ah… I shall become a woman of sophistication. Like Bianca in The Rescuers (except human and not a mouse).
What my yearly ritual of “getting into perfume” really means in practice, though, is going to some website, picking some samples, trying them, feeling like I can’t be bothered, putting them into a drawer, repeat. Even things that smell nice never feel worth the (admittedly minimal) effort of using them and certainly not the (frequently sky-high) price of buying them.2
It’s also difficult for me to figure out the difference between using perfume well (a nice grace note to your day, and perhaps the days of others should they be standing close to you) and using perfume badly (broadcasting a cloud of scent that triggers migraines from five feet away). I used to be quite sensitive to scented products myself, and still am sometimes—I have a strong preference for minimally scented or unscented products like soap, shampoo, and so on. I don’t want to make anybody’s day worse.3 I just want to feel like a fancy little mouse, you know?
Anyway. This time, when the urge struck, I decided to order some samples from an indie fragrance shop called Cocoapink.4 I once again followed my habit of choosing samples sort of at random, basing them off of smells I like in general… except for one, because it was the one everybody who likes Cocoapink mentions. This one was called “Cinderella’s Carriage.” I ordered it even though the scent description for Cinderella’s Carriage is… well… a lot:
Cocoapink apparently makes all their perfumes to order, so it took about a month and a half for my little set of samples to arrive. Once it did, I decided to start with the fan favorite; I pulled out Cinderella’s Carriage and dabbed some on.
Here are some things I quickly learned:
What that description means is: you smell like a sugar cookie.
It’s kind of nice to smell like a sugar cookie.
The term for this type of perfume is “gourmand.”
Per link above… everybody hates gourmands?5
Well, “hate” is strong (the attitude described is that gourmands are “perfume for the masses, for the cheap thrill seekers, the people who have no interest venturing beyond the designer counter”). I have no reason to care if people think I have good taste in perfume, as long as I’m not setting off any migraines, so that part doesn’t matter much to me.6 What really interested me reading that Substack post was that I would have just assumed I didn’t like anything that smelled “sweet” or vanilla-y or dessert-y if I hadn’t decided to go against my natural inclination. I would have continued to look for samples that listed notes like “cedar” or what have you, because I like how cedar smells. I don’t want vanilla-scented soap or shampoo, so why would I want a vanilla-scented me?
It didn’t occur to me that what a smell is like on something else might be very different from what a smell is like on me. And thinking about it further I realize that so many objects are scented with fairly obnoxious versions of floral scents or sugary scents that I sort of assumed the nicer version wouldn’t really be nicer… just pricier. Or even if it were nicer it would be in a way I couldn’t notice because I would be too reminded of the smell of Herbal Essences to take in the actual smell.
So basking in that new self-knowledge, I saw a viral tweet about gourmands by sheer luck.7 And I thought, well, why not, so I ordered a bunch of samples from that independent… parfumerie…?, Odette. And yes, I love them. They’re great.8 I bought most of the samples in a bigger size, I got a book about perfume because this is my personality now, and so on.
But that is not the really crazy thing.
No, the actual crazy thing is that the jokey description about how perfume would move me more toward the Bianca end of the spectrum, mentally, up above? It was true. For the first time ever in my entire life I bought something stupid expecting me to leave me vaguely improved and it did. After I decided to get a full sized perfume I was looking at my messy bathroom and thought “that’s not very nice.” So I went through all my cabinets and refolded things and tossed out stuff that was expired so that the perfume would have a suitable home.
Then I finished purging the clothes that don’t fit me, tidied up my desk area, tidied up the sort of “den” like area down here in the basement that serves as my informal living room, tidied up my nightstand… it was like any mess at all became so actively irritating to me that I could not rest until I fixed it. And now everything is tidy and everything has a place and I don’t have like three different kinds of expired vitamins and it is all thanks, as far as I can tell, to deciding I kind of wanted to smell like a cookie all of the time. I made my bed! I never make my bed!
Now… if only it can help me write my sample chapter….
That or it’s because I started taking a new kind of iron supplement. Who knows really.
Plus—and this is not something I can particularly justify, but it’s true—I feel more positively about perfume than I do other beauty products, at least in terms of wearing something on a day to day basis.
Though I will note here that on the face of it the cost of perfume doesn’t bother me in some “no x should cost more than y” way. Or, rather, it’s like clothes. Some brands are overpriced in ways that do not meaningfully reflect anything about the expertise or labor behind them—or even while exploiting labor despite the price tag—but not all of them.
It may also be that it doesn’t bother me because perfume, famously, is maybe the only luxury item in the New Testament singled out as fine to splurge on.
This is the difference between being Bianca in The Rescuers and Medusa in The Rescuers I suppose. (It’s pretty funny how transparently Medusa is just a copy / paste of Cruella now that I rewatch that clip… I’m pretty sure that her driving is just repurposed animation from 101 Dalmatians?)
I ended up here by googling “is there aluminum-free deodorant that actually works,” but I can’t really tell you why I was doing that because I don’t want an aluminum-free deodorant. I actually did try some once, long ago (Soapwalla, it was a sort of cream you rubbed in), and it was effective… right up until I started breaking out in a rash (because of the baking powder).
Austin asked me what a “gourmand” was and I said “it means smelling like food” and he was like well that sounds horrible.
I mean… why start caring now… that ship sailed several Taylor Swift posts ago.
Personal ranking:
Pas des Chat
Grand Battement / Rose Adage
Petit Gâteau
Coup des Pied
Odette launched a new fragrance (Moulin Rose) after I got these samples that I haven’t tried and also has a limited release coming out this July called “Madeleine.”
BDM... thank you... I am 100% here for the Getting Really Into Perfume Occasionally posts (& if we could turn the comment section into a group chat, I would be extremely happy).
Your points about having less conflicted feelings about wearing scents vs. other beauty products, AND about not wanting to give people migraines, v. much resonated with me. The Take Was Good. Also I too went through an experience of realizing I actually really love the smell of vanilla fragrances on me. Everyone: stop dissing the cookie
When I was in Cork last year, I found a little niche perfumerie (Cork Niche Fragrances, https://cduparfums.com/) that was (perhaps not to my credit) one of the highlights of the trip for me. I ended up getting Holy Stick from Chapel Factory & I love it, though I'm not sure everyone else does. (Need more honest feedback.) I'm also fascinated by the fragrance creator's background, as she wasn't trained in perfumery. Could I... have a future in creating scents too??? ("Why would you do that, Natalie" Just dreamin')
By any chance is the book you got Perfumes the A-Z Guide, by Turin and Sanchez? I recently learned of it and it sounds fascinating.
I have recently been involved with this topic and for the first time ordered a bunch of samples from Zoologist, because I liked their aesthetic and descriptions, but didn't find anything I liked more than the $30 bottle my wife got me at TJ Maxx a couple months back. I just need something that spiffs up my mind in the background, not "look at me/smell me/run from me".
In re aluminum-free deodorants, FWIW the Old Spice Zero-Aluminums go on right, no baking powder so far as I know, and the scents are not excessively masculine (per my wife who uses mine now). Possibly not quite as all-day effective as regular, but the reduction/elimination of clothes-staining has been fantastic.