Scent Of A Woman

How finding the perfect perfume turned out to be an act of self-affirmation

- Katherine Laidlaw

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I sat on my parents’ paisley bedspread and stared at the kaleidoscopic bottles of perfume arranged on my mother’s dresser. They cast rainbows around the room in the right light, and I was mesmerized. Less appealing were the scents themselves—combinations of chemicals my young nose was too untrained to understand. But I knew even then that they were symbols of glamour, subtle ways to send signals in the night.

As I got older, I began to experiment. I saved up my allowance and, like so many kids of the 1990s, spent it on travel-sized silver bottles of Gap Dream and Gap Heaven. As a teenager, my parents gave me Ralph by Ralph Lauren, because for some reason I wanted to smell like a tangerine putridly close to expiring. To no one’s surprise, the attention I most often caught was that of wasps at summertime barbecues. Later, I’d wear Chloé by Chloé, hoping in an awkward phase that it would flirt for me, and because my boyfriend at the time liked it. And then there was Philosophy’s Falling in Love, because I wanted so badly to be sweet to everyone I knew.

None of them lasted. And I realized, eventually, that every perfume I’d ever worn was an attempt to be something for somebody else. So I put them away.