Mistakes Were Made

After Portia’s post on SJP Lovely, I felt an undeniable longing to go find my bottle of Narciso Rodriguez, which I was pretty sure was in the perfume-stash cooler I packed for moving.  Each bottle was safely wrapped pre-move, in their boxes if I had them, and then individually bagged (and in some cases, double-bagged, depending on the size/state/fear-factor of the fragrance) in hopes that any disasters would be contained.

WELL.  The bags aren’t transparent, so I generally need a peek to see what I’ve grabbed.  Early in my cooler search I pulled out this great lump of a thing, clearly an unboxed bottle, and realized it had leaked some dark, viscous liquid into its bagging, and not an insubstantial amount either.  Okay, fine, might as well deal with it now, right?

I really wish I had videocam footage of my face when I realized the fist-size lump I was holding was my vintage stoppered flacon of Poison.  I’m sure anyone looking at the footage would think: my god, she’s just realized she’s holding a grenade with the pin removed.

My brain was processing furiously.  I mean, maybe I couldn’t smell the wrapped thing in my hand, but I had the sense to realize that splashing it around the kitchen willy-nilly would be detectable to other people for decades.  Possibly forever.  Really, the prep was hilarious – I didn’t know whether the fragrance was already on my right hand at that point, so we had five minutes of left-handed maneuvers while I found a disposable plastic bowl to set the thing down in, then a lay-down of a plastic trash bag and some newspaper on the counter, before I proceeded with unwrapping the bottle.  You’d have thought I was dissecting a skunk, which to some people would have been preferable.

Could I smell it after unwrapping?  Nope!  Which – hahahahaha – should give you some idea of my anosmia right this second.  Poison’s a fragrance I could smell for days on my skin, even the tiniest dab, and I was always extremely careful not to get it on anything I couldn’t wash.  In fact, I remember wondering before I bought it on eBay whether I even wanted to own a stoppered flacon of something so terrifying to spill.  I decided I did – I had one just like it in the bad old 1980s – and I was thrilled to have it again.  I love it, and I think the bottle’s beautiful.  Anyway, I spent thirty extremely cautious minutes with paper towels, a damp cloth, and the trash can open right next to me, while I wiped the flacon down (my careful taping of the stopper while packing apparently hadn’t been enough) and then made sure every last bit of anything I’d touched wound up in the trash.  Then I scoured my hands and promptly took the trash outside to the bin.

Right now, to me Poison smells … musky and faintly of cherries, like maybe somebody spilled a bit of cough syrup on the counter last week.  Other recent trials: Mitsouko (extrait and EdP), which smell very faint, like a combination of Jicky and peach (okay, not so far off in my impression, but almost imperceptible to my nose), and Lutens’ Fleurs d’Oranger.  Which smelled like a very lightly-scented orange oil on a rag.  That’s a bit of a …. shocker.  I used to be able to smell FdO from the next room over, hours after I’d sprayed it once.

I tried dabbing them.  I tried applying to a cloth and then waving them in the air.  I thought about spritzing my chair, or the pillow, but those seemed like bad ideas since someone may actually visit me indoors someday, and there’s a limit to how much non-disposable miasma I want to create in here.  But I’ll keep trying!

Have you had any perfume disasters?

PS In case you missed it, Patty wrote about a french-fry-scented perfume called Frites on Friday, which I find hilarious.  I want it just for the swanky bottle!