I don’t write perfume reviews. You have probably noticed this by now.

I’m not writing to sell anything, support myself, or meet editorial guidelines. I haven’t a clue whether you’ll like or loathe any given perfume. I don’t know your tastes, your budget, or why you wear scent, so how could I? If you need note lists and sillage measurements, sorry, I will fail you. If you enjoy haphazard waltzes down memory paths, odd analogies, flippant definitions, free-flowing emotions, over-stretched metaphors, and small plastic dinosaurs, however, we’re golden.

Perfume is my indulgence, and so I’ve only been writing about perfumes I find intriguing, about perfumes that move me, entertain me, make me think. Syrupy fruit salads bore me, and pale florals rarely thrill me. Coconut gives me the boak. Boozy scents repel me. And though I’ll eat a ton of cake or mango, I have no desire to smell of either.  I have strong opinions about scent.  Why waste my time on bad scents, boring scents, and the indeterminate flood of by-the-numbers shelf-filling scents when I’m writing for the joy of it? But it’s never uncritical love, not even for those perfumers whose work fascinates me, or for perfumes that have already justified my coughing up cash. If I say I love a fragrance, I mean it, even if I’ve not shown my workings or the seventeen reasons why.

Something that began as an exercise to rebuild my atrophied thesis-writing muscles has shown me, ninety posts in, how very much I enjoy writing and thinking about fragrance, about the experience of scent, about memory, communication, identity, and art. And oh, how I cherish the conversations that spin off from this.

I had originally planned to stop at one hundred posts, but I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.

(Photo has to be Miss Dior, my first true perfume love.)

originally posted 13 July 2019.