Last week, fellow Dupontee Betty Joan did a post about perfume. I’ve always been fascinated by scent, and well, anyone who wants to smell like Velvet can just buy Angel by Thierry Mugler, mix that with a little sex, and voila! Eau de Velvet. Okay, that sorta grosses me out a little.

I’m almost at the end of the delicious Angel perfume, which brings me to a quandry I shall explain in a minute. Since I was 18, I have chosen a scent and worn it daily until the bottle is empty - which is usually about a year. That is a great way for me to go back and smell a perfume and be instantly blown back to the point in time when I wore that fragrance. As I commented on Betty Joan’s post - Eternity is the end of high school and early college. If I open Eternity at the fragrance counter, I’m reminded of making out in my boyfriend’s Pontiac GTO and getting caught by the cops. (Three times that summer.) Oops. Sophmore year of college? Fendi. Hooking up with my R.A. and declaring a major. Gio, Giorgio Armani was my trademark scent for junior and senior year of college. I loved that perfume until a friend bought it, I got pissed off because I like a scent to be a signature scent. Then I threw it out and found “something new.”

The “something new” continues to be my secret weapon, a fragrance I will never reveal as a promise to myself, something so delicious I never want to smell anyone else wearing it. I wore it while I was 23 and 24, another wonderful time in my life of taking a cruise through Mexico and having fun boyfriend after fun boyfriend. When that bottle ran out, I was preparing for the big move in with AtlantaBoy. My roommate in Connecticut (who I was now leaving behind) was wearing “Romance” by Ralph Lauren. Based on theory above, I didn’t want to wear it while we were living together. But once I moved to Atlanta, fair game bitch. I basically wore Romance for that entire relationship and then some. I have to say, it’s an unbelievable perfume. It smells just as great the next morning as it did when freshly sprayed. But I can’t go back. It reminds me of him, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I wouldn’t want to reimpose it in my life and have the memories blur together. It feels like cheating. Or trying to wash away the past.

So, the quandry. What fragrance to choose. I could continue with Angel, as it is the scent Sherlock / new man / Mr.PantsonFire is used to smelling on me. But, I hesitate. Angel reminds me of a very turbulent past 18 months. It reminds me of all night binges, dating countless men, buying my condo and the hellacious renovation I masterminded, and starting this blog. All fun memories, but the first two hopefully things in the past. I don’t want new man to have a scent of me on his memory that other men I’ve dated also identify me with. I want him to have one of his own. And he and I have also had a rough time over the past three months since we met. So it is my goal between now and the end of the Angel bottle, to find something new. Like sands in an hourglass, there are only a few weeks of Angel left.

I have two very distinct ideas, but both will require several trips to the fragrance counter to try try and try. The one complaint I have with Angel is that I smell like a cheap whore the next morning. (Wait…maybe that’s not the perfume…) I want something like Romance, that smells just as great “stale” as it does “fresh.” Little help please, if you can.

I was giving this some thought the other day, and I recalled reading an article last year about a perfume that was returning to the market. In its heyday, it was so popular, when it was discontinued, there were near riots. Of course I would never wear something so ubiquitous. I do like the obscure. But…the name. The name of the perfume is so apropos to how I feel right now, that I might be willing to check it out.

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