The Best of Fan Bingbing

She can do no wrong, to be honest.

Perfume

“He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”

― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Tell me about yourself. What scents give you the blues and what do you smell like in the morning after a warm shower? Do you choose your soaps and perfumes carefully at a counter in a department store? Or online after browsing several long descriptions? Or do you merely sweep bars of Irish Spring into your cart from grocery store shelves on Sunday afternoons?

I am guilty of the sweeping part, although I find myself inundated with perfume gifts all the time. After 4 years, though, my free bottle of Juicy Couture has finally run dry, sending me on a sniffing trail for my next scent. Usually, I smell strongly of pine needles in a forest (intermixed with Juicy's sweet notes), but I would like something more...distinguished and classier than that. I want my own signature scent, like a lady!

Because even though smelling like one particular thing might seem boring, people's memories are tied to smells and I'd like to be remembered in unexpected times. I had a teacher in middle school, for example, who wore this incredible musky perfume. Many years later, that same scent wafted to my nose while I was in line at a Target three states away, and I involuntarily looked around for her. I want to give someone else the same whiplash I experienced in Target that night.

Lady Gaga's new perfume, "Fame," will likely have that effect on people, described as the "tears of belladonna, crushed heart of tiger orchidea with a black veil of incense, pulverized apricot and the combinative essences of saffron and honey drops," all contained in a metal bottle (ingenious I tell you!). Yes, it probably just smells like sweet licorice, but if anything embodies her, it's licorice and pulverized apricots. ((Also, have you seen the bottle? (it's not metal, but perhaps this isn't the only edition.))

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Often, celebrities use perfumes as an extensions of their images, which in turn, insinuate themselves in our memories and everyday associations. I think we should alter our own scents to be extensions of who we think we are and would like to be, too.

So here is what the ideal me would smell like: Rain-wet picture books, Lothlórien forest wood, Miltonic angels and rose petals, all soaking in a bottle of prickly stems and leaves.

Or ya know, maybe just like plain ol' jasmine.

I'll show myself out now.