Scents & Sensibility

Every year at this time advertising accelerates which means more catalogs and more perfume inserts falling out of them.

Yesterday, I decided to actually sniff at some of these inserts and found myself sidetracked by the naming of perfumes. Long ago, when my dear Mother was braiding my curly hair, there were two perfumes – Jean Nate and Chanel No. 5. She used one or the other to pat down the rosy frizzies crowning my head. Never gave their names much thought. Later on I began to notice other perfumes… Lily of the Valley (not hard to understand), Emeraud (okay…green bottle like emeralds), and then I encountered Tabu – a fascinating name for a fourteen-year-old. Tabu was the first perfume that got me wondering about scents and nonsense. The idea of smelling like something forbidden was quite delicious in my junior-high thinking… as long as that forbidden something actually smelled tolerable.

The years rolled and with them a range of names – some fruity – like Royal Lime and Love’s Fresh Lemon -- with the implications that limey equals royalty and lemons are the scent of love. Then came Love’s Baby Soft – who doesn’t love a baby and they are soft! There was also 4711 which I never understood, except that if Chanel could have a number 5, there were perhaps 4,706 other scents between the two including 1000 De Jean Patou, 12 Couturier, and 273.

There were the flower scents – Fleur de Desirade, Fleur d’Eau, and Fleur D’Interdit as well as the water scents – Cool Water, Eau de Soir and Eau Savage (what do savage waters actually smell like… a Minnesota pond in late August? No sale.)

Moving forward in life, I noticed that perfume naming branched out – Obsession, Compulsion and Secret Obsession hit the market – perfumes which had a corresponding diagnosis code in the Physician’s Desk Reference. Now one could literally, wear one’s issues on one’s sleeve. And then there are the subtle implications of smelling like Intuition, Happy, Splash, Splendour and Sensuous. One can choose between a drop of lofty, laughy or a little naughty.

Then came Eternity and Heaven. Perfume could be a spiritual experience that lifts one’s sight above that of human experience. Clothed in eternity, one hopes to reach heaven so these are scents that seem somehow, relevant.

Which brings us to yesterday. The first fragrance to fall out of the catalog was Unforgivable. What does that mean? Is the person who wears it is beyond forgiveness or is it unforgivable to purchase it – or not purchase it? What does being unforgivable actually smell like? It seems to me that being beyond forgiveness may actually have the scent of death about it. Does anyone actually want to smell that way? Isn’t being unforgivable a scary thing?

Perhaps it is too great a leap to jump from perfume to the Bible – although there was that woman who used a bottle of precious perfume on the feet of Jesus. Jesus was all about forgiveness and it seems He wanted us to be about forgiveness also. The Bible says there is only one thing that is truly unforgivable. I, for one, do not want to be known for that. Yet forgiveness is not a ride on a pink duck (to borrow a phrase) – sometimes it is easy to feel unforgivable and very hard to be forgiving. But do we want to smell Unforgivable?

Have we come to a point in our culture that being the bad man or woman is so alluring that we glorify it and name perfumes after it?

I would like my life to reflect a different aroma – perhaps a perfume called Integrity or Compassion or Faithfulness or Gentleness – but those fragrances are not to be found at the perfume counter and I wonder… Why?

The answer was found in the next fragrance leaflet falling from the catalog.

It was called I Am King.