Perfume is Pleasure

The only thing I love better than smelling perfume is talking about perfume!

As a professional fragrance educator and coach in a world that says: “You’re a what?!” I must infuse cyberspace with my presence. The mission: Paint my solution to the big problem - Consumers Lack The Language of Scent - on the canvas of the Internet. Normally, I would contain myself to perfume, home fragrance, scent marketing and the like.

Social networking (code for online marketing, but in a friendly, personal way) is new to me, but my future depends on it, I am told. In a prior corporate incarnation, I looked with disdain on “reply to all” and other mass broadcasts of information that could and should have been delivered discreetly from one individual to another.

Now, compelled by the advice of people who know, as well as by the gut sense that I can no more successfully resist this than I did voicemail, I am nominally “on” Linked-in and Facebook, but not yet “up” on either.

For the record, I’ll twitter over my own dead body. Maybe I take myself too seriously. “What are you doing now?” they ask me. A fabulous woman and new Facebook friend reports that she just had oatmeal for breakfast and I cheer. High fiber. Filling. Great protein in a carbohydrate. Astounding cholesterol-lowering properties. I write a private e-mail to commend her and offer my exhortations to carry on in her pursuit of a healthy diet. Would no sooner post this on her Facebook wall than report my plans to head for the bathroom. That was a week ago. Today another new Facebook friend and respected real friend announced to the world that she was off to make a batch of granola. What a coincidence. I, too, made granola today! But is it news? Two oatmeal posts in a week? This seem to be a thing.

I am having a change of heart. Oatmeal is important.

But Oatmeal’s importance is as a grain of sand on the beach when compared to that of coffee. Perfume is pleasure and coffee is the best smell in the world. Some of you have heard me profess oakmoss to be my very favorite smell, maybe even on TV.  Either I’m lying or I have more than one very favorite smell. Please comment on your very favorite smell(s).

Bois de Jasmin, great perfume blog, lists Givenchy Very Irresistible for Men as a fragrance with a coffee note, well, mocha, actually, but don’t hold a little chocolate against them.

What bride does not want to smell wonderful on her wedding day? Artfully selected fragrance is a great way to start a new life and to share something personal with bridesmaids and wedding guests. Brides at the Grace Ormonde Grand Bridal Show loved the choice of fragrance matchmaking services for ready to wear scents, perfume parties and exquisite custom scents designed note by note, just for them. All-natural options, of course! Environmental scenting is another way to personalize a festive event - I scented the Grand Bridal Show with green tea and lemongrass.  See lauradonna.com on Grace Ormonde’s site for 2009 Platinum Vendors.

Official Grace Ormonde Grand Bridal Show photographer, the talented Matthew J. Wagner,  shared this photo with me.

Turns out, perfume is not all fashion and glamor. Research shows that our preferences are biological. Remember Lou Reed’s song from the original motion picture soundtrack of White Nights?

When I see the way you paint your lips and I smell your perfume
When I see the brand new color that you’ve dyed your hair to
I know, you know, it’s more than physical
My love, my love, my love, love is chemical

White Nights featured not only the endearing and iconoclastic tunester Lou Reed, but also the fancy feet of Mikhail Baryshnikov and tap prodigy Gregory Hines. I do not, as you may fear, digress from perfume. Once upon a time, our Russian ballet prodigy launched his own celebrity juice. Now discontinued, Misha Perfume for Women featured topnotes of peach, bergamot and lemon, a heart of jasmine, rose, raspberry, carnation and cinnamon as well as basenotes of vetiver, patchouli and amber.

Other than the simple explanation of chemical attraction, why do we prefer the scents we do? For ourselves? For others? In its December 18, 2008 article, “The scent of a man,” The Economist reported that women in an experimental setting prefer the sweaty t-shirts of men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is most unlike their own. Dr. Manfred Millinski and Dr. Claus Wedekind researched this phenomenon at the University of Bern in 2001.

I am no more interested in science than you, so hang tough with the lingo for a minute. For fellow liberal-artsy types, MHC is good to mix between sex partners, as the children of unions between diverse MHC carriers will have relatively strong immune systems. In cattle terms, women like men who smell like they come from different stock.

Now what do women want from their own perfume? Millinski and Wedekind asked “Would you like to smell like that yourself?” and “Would you like your partner to smell like that?” to tease out the distinctions. Perfume preferences women express for themselves are directly correlated with their own personal flavor of the human leukocyte antigen, or human MHC (last big words I’ll use, promise!). A woman chooses perfume to amplify and broadcast her own genetic composition. But the partner, you recall, should smell of something “other,” not of “self.”

The punchline for perfume shoppers: Buy your own. According to The Economist, we are best equipped to select scent for ourselves and for close blood relatives.