Odor and Identity: Perfume as Infidelity Training
I Stink, Therefore I Am
Excerpt from the unpublished book Lenses.
At a drug store this morning, the clerk at the counter accidentally spilled perfume on her hands. There was nothing she could do to get rid of the smell. She’d just have to wait for it to wear off.
That’s when it occurred to me that there should be a perfume-removal product. We have removal products for just about everything else a woman puts on herself — nail-polish removers, makeup removers. Why not perfume?
Such a product could be a winner in and of itself, but it also could be a boon to the perfume industry. If you could quickly, easily, and effectively remove a fragrance, you could get into the habit of changing fragrances, as often as you change your clothes or your makeup. There could be morning, afternoon, evening, and bedtime fragrances. There could be fragrances for business, for home, for shopping, for social occasions. With the right advertising, consumers could become convinced that such changes are not just an option, but a social necessity. You’d feel naked without the right fragrance, or maybe you’d feel just as gauche using the wrong perfume as you would wearing the wrong kind of clothes or the wrong kind of makeup for a particular occasion.
Then it occurred to me that perfume — not products that clean the body and remove distasteful odors, but rather products meant to generate an artificial presumably attractive odor — have a negative side-effect. Normally, the touch, the sight, the taste, and the smell of your partner are all connected with your partner’s identity. In the process of falling in love, like Pavlov’s dog, you learn to associate all those sensory cues with your beloved.
By nature, a person’s scent is unique to that person; and when you become intimately close to someone, your ability to recognize small differences is heightened. But commercial perfumes are mass produced. When a woman wears a perfume when she is with her partner, she unwittingly trains that person to associate that scent, rather than her own unique scent, with romantic feelings. You might say she is training her partner for infidelity.
Similarly, when a woman dyes her hair, she takes a characteristic that can uniquely identify her and help her bond with her partner and trades it in for something any other woman could easily imitate.
