The subject came to mind after I had been writing a post on mothers, daughters, and perfume. If you didn’t care for the perfume you smelled on your mother, what would you have chosen instead? Mine wore Tabu, which I thought most inappropriate for a mother, but what would I have recommended to my mother, if she had been able to hear my advice at the age of thirty or so?
This is a delicate subject. Everyone who wears perfume wants to smell attractive, or at the very least not off putting to other people, but is perfume like clothing? Do we give off signals to others by virtue of the perfumes we wear? Do perfumes have semiotic sub-texts, the way that just about everything else in our lives seems to now, or are they purely a matter of marketing and the accidents of skin chemistry? Continue reading