Scents and sensibility

He didn’t seem like the type. Looking at him, you’d think he was just like every other mid-40’s government official: gray jacket over a white shirt, tie slightly askew, nicotine stains between his index and middle fingers. The kind of guy you’d barely notice if he walked by you in an airport or a corner pub.

 

Then he walked within 12 feet of me, and I was nose-blasted by the kind of olfactory assault that could wipe out a peep of free-range chickens. It was nothing so innocent as body odor; no, this was far more calculated and sinister.

 

My closet-smoker friend had doused himself in a veritable ocean of cologne.

 

Years ago, I befriended a young lady who was obsessed with a fragrance called “Curve.” This scent came in both men’s and women’s varieties – the women’s line a little sweeter, vaguely reminiscent of a non-specific bed of flowers, and the men’s line a touch harsher, with a faint suggestion of the gender’s proclivity towards armpit sweat and bratwurst belches. This friend, “Cruella,” insisted that I try some out to see how it suited me, strongly hinting that she considered it an aphrodisiac and I wouldn’t be disappointed. I was (and still am) a guy, so I was pretty much sold. Gotta give her credit for knowing how to circumvent a man’s shyness.

 

Not once in my life had I ever voluntarily applied cologne to myself. It wasn’t that I had anything against it. It just never occurred to me. Naively, I figured that if I sniffed myself and didn’t immediately pass out from the noxious fumes, then I was good to go. As far as I was concerned, I smelled like soapy skin and Crayola brand colored pencils. Who could object to that?

 

So it was with some trepidation that I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, holding the bottle of Curve in my hand. I wondered what my father would think – my father, a manly man whose idea of a fragrance was swallowing half a bottle of breath spray and walking around in a cloud of citrus Binaca. Meekly, not knowing the first thing about applying cologne, I put a small daub on my fingers and patted the area of my neck behind the ears, feeling absurdly dainty and out of my element.

 

I discovered two things that night. One is that Cruella really likes Curve.

 

Two is that I’m just not a cologne guy. I don’t have anything against it in theory; some peoples’ natural musk smells like a gasoline-soaked rag in a wastebin full of week-old buffalo wings. No amount of showering can rid them of this animal funk, so access to a fragrance of some kind seems not only logical, but mandatory.

 

For those of us whose bodies have a more normal pH balance, though, it strikes me as unnecessary. As it is, our nostrils are already an access point for a bevy of chemicals both natural and artificial. On any given day, we might inhale particulate matter from roasting hot dogs, glazed doughnuts, wet paint, hot rubber tires, deer droppings and the fetid breath of a crotch-licking Basset Hound. The last thing I’d want is to add to that list an eye-watering compound concocted in a laboratory. If I truly yearned for the incongruous odor of flowers growing in a field made of chocolate, I’d make myself a necklace of lilacs and Hershey bars.

 

You’ll find that some people are very diligent about their diet – only eating certain foods, drinking certain beverages. I propose a diet of the nose: only inhaling particulants that have never seen in inside of a test tube.

 

That goes for women, too, although women in general seem to be better than men at applying fragrances tastefully. The ones with real skill only smell like perfume when they brush close against you, or when they stroll by on a summer’s day and are blasted by a gust of wind heading in your direction. This talent may come with practice, or may be due to a fundamental gender difference. Perhaps women have a more refined sense of smell, whereas men’s noses have been bludgeoned and weakened by constant exposure to smelly guy-type things, like tackle boxes and gross domestic beer.

 

Maybe it’s time a sweet-smelling lady gave some pointers to our nicotine-addicted government official, he of the mutant chemical reek.

 

A wayward breeze wasn’t necessary for his metal-corroding scent to be noticed. In fact, if a breeze had come along, it would have picked up on his store-bought aura and changed course, altering weather patterns in the process and sending snow flurries to the coast of Spain. It was as though a cologne truck had smashed into another cologne truck, and the resulting chemical reaction mutated nearby atoms into a full-grown man, who was then run over by another cologne truck. For the purposes of this analogy, let’s assume there’s such a thing as a cologne truck.

 

Why anyone would douse themselves to this degree is a mystery. It’s possible the man’s olfactory equipment was compromised by a grenade explosion during a tour in a foreign war, but I’m more inclined to chalk it up to plain ol’ insecurity. Freshly washed, the human body actually doesn’t smell that bad. It produces pheromones, which can yield a subtle and pleasing aroma, and when you add in the most excellent potpourri of light body wash and brand-name laundry detergent, good things can happen. Self-drenching in a bath of goop is only acceptable in extreme circumstances, like when you get pelted at the zoo by a gang of poo-flinging chimps. 

 

Mr. Government Man clearly didn’t have this excuse. A double-breasted Oxford is not animal-watching attire. Since I’m a forgiving dude – sometimes – I’m willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume something terrible happened on the way to his meeting. An incident with a leaky toddler, or a chain-smoking jag brought on by stress. Anything.

 

Because the only alternative is that his pungency is voluntary. And that just stinks.