How does your body smell?

After reading Patrick Süskind's book, I got a bit obsessed of how me and people surrounding me smell like.

It turned out that my mum's skin smells like fresh apple with baby powdery notes when she is not wearing perfumes. One of my best friend in Grasse smells like aneth, even though she never eats it, her hair, her skin and her whole apartment smells of it!!!

To discover your own smell, I suggest to smell the area under the breasts, or your elbow pit after you have spent at least 2 days without using any fragranced products.

Getting to know your smell is a long process, you might not define it perfectly at first time. If you have difficulties, you can sniff your pajamas that you wore for a few nights to have something tangible to analyse.

When I first examined my body smell, I couldn't name exactly what I smell like, but I was directly in love with it!

Sometimes I am capable of smelling myself with an "objective nose", I am not really sure how it works, cause I only had it for a few times so far, but it clearly was a pretty schizophrenic experience! As if for the first time ever, I smelled myself with "somebody else's nose".

To my greatest surprise, I realized that I am being perceived like ozone with a touch of rice powder. ( Beforehand I liked to think of myself as somebody ambery or deep vanilla-ish... )

Apparently, your smell can change due to the change in your diet or if you travel to a different country/continent. Though I hardly believe that from flowery you change to basil, just because you travelled to egypt and ate a pizza, we all know that certain foods like garlic and asparagus have a great effect.

Defining how your body smells like, is part of getting to know yourself and it serves as a major advantage when chosing your signature perfume!

How to double your chances to find your perfect scent?

Today I am wearing Lolita Lempicka for men, and at least 5 person complimented me on my scent so far, and it 's only 6pm...

Men perfumes are not only for men. Same with ones tagged "for her". If you think certain fragrances are masculin or feminin, be sure that it is not because of your taste, but because your nose was educated to feel this way, mostly based on your culture or very simply due to gendre specific marketing and advertising.

Since a perfume gets only full with the actual accord of your skin, think of the scented products targeted to the opposite sex as unfinished creations awaiting to be completedwith your body's smell! Why would you restrain yourself to only half of what is on the market?!

It all started for me when my brother got Brut by Fabergé when he turned 14 years old. I was only 12, but I knew I will have to handle the stress of secretly stealing a few splash from every day. He, of course, caught me red handed (or red wristed rather....) and finally I got my own bottle of Brut for next Christmas. Brut smelled absolutely fabulous on my skin, like honey just harvested mixed with melted ylang ylang and lavendar juice. My brother stopped wearing it long before I got bored of it.

My boyfriend at the time wore Boss Bottles by Hugo Boss. I actually got in love with his scent more than with himself... I broke up with him just about the time I got my own bottle of the perfume. This is my signature scent. It's not only how it smells - cooked apple with fine musks and cardamom on me - but how it makes me feel. I am strong and full of energy when I have it on. Though I have a weird relationship with my signature scent. I treat this fragrance as Harry Potter does it with Felix Felicis magic potion; with caution and moderation, so that the magical effect won't looses its force :)

First time I went to Sephora in Champs Elysées to spray Gucci II pour homme on, an enthusiastic shop assistant came to inform me that I was mistaken, the products for women were just across the shop. Since I worked for nearly 3 years in the same building, I had enough time to convince her to give up her sexist ideas of perfumes. After a few months, she fell in love with Kenzo for men and still wears it to day. ( For me it was just a japanese soap, but on her it's becoming the most intoxicating scent ever!!! )

Not only there are adventurous women out there: My boyfriend smells amazing wearing Serge Luten's Fleur d'Oranger - which could be considered as an orange blossom headspace, quite unusual scent for a men, but it works perfectly on his skin.

I have heard recently from a fellow perfume blogger that it is "a la mode" in Paris for a young men to wear the female version of Amor Amor by Cacharel.

There are no men or women perfumes. Soon, more and more companies will realize that too. Mostly not for the sake of the beautiful philosophy behind my theory, but rather for doubling the number of possible buyers in a second... Hermes for years now is not addressing its products to nor women or men. They let the customers decide.

Or just have a look at Dolce and Gabbana's Tarot Fragrances; while they are suggesting with visuals who the target audience, they position them as unisex fragrances.

I really need vacation!

Yesterday I had that kind of dream with Jean Claude Ellena.

We were getting it on in his office, but than his 6 years old son entered into the room with a guitar ( what the heck?! ) and started crying and ran out from the room. JC swiftly stopped what he was doing between my legs, and rushed directly after his son. I knew our short but passionate love affair was over and all I could think of was how very sad that I didn't even had time to ask him for the formula of Hiris...

Not another shampoo review

Is it only me or Schwarzkopf's Gliss Liquid Silk Gloss really smells exactly like Stella by Stella McCartney?

A nose in a metro

Anybody who gets to know that I am a Nose, usually asks me how I survive public transportation with such strong capacity of smelling?

I usually tell them that bad smell for me has no meaning anymore. "Bad" became rather interesting, or let's say what average people call 'bad smell' just challenges my mind work together with my nose to understand more the particular odor's structure.

Moreover, I tend to hate some fragrances or scents that are considered normal or even pleasent for others. As I have mentioned it many times before, tarragon's essential oil makes me want to throw up.

It's weird green sweetness along with metallic cold and disharmonic overwhelming heavy stickiness is probably the worst thing my nose have ever encoutered -including my famous horse stable visit where I almost prefered to die than breathing.

That said, public transport is actually one of my favorite experimental field, where scent-trails are changing with each station, some sources of smells ( i.e. travellers ) changing position, some getting off, some new ones coming into my scentmap. Apart from humans, I find the real metro scent not very sexy. The heavy, oily smelling cold metal handrails are carrying a rather faint olfactive prints of recent attempt to disinfection.

A few days ago in Paris, I took the metro to go to see a great new show in a theatre. Jammed inside along with a hundred parisians, I closed my eyes and let the mixture of scents, odors and smells get me.

The first thing that hit me was the breath of a young man, talking to his girlsfriend. His mouth smelled lacerated by nicotine and tar, mixed with a cheap red wine. The girl was also a smoker but she probably didn't consume wine, I could not detect that.

She smelled of a tired menthol chewing gum, and a really expensive niche perfume dried off on her skin totally unmatching her own scent and personality.

Apart from the obvious surface scents, both of them were envelopped with heavy mud and fresh cut grass - olfactively speaking of course, perhaps they were coming from a park. ( ....Or they both wore Thierry Mugler's 'fig-mud' smelling Womanity?! :)

On the other side, a lady in her 40s smelled like the latest flanker of Dior's Hypnotic Poison but her nice scent-harmony was distorted by a cheap, J'adore-trickle-down fabric softner that infected her clothes - hence her aura as well.

A dude sitting near to me, smelled so intensly familiar and comforting to me as if I was around my family. Weirdly, it made me remind of night too. I instantly saw myself in my shared bedroom in our cottage, and than it still took me few minutes to realize that the fragrance is simply very similar to a certain insect killer product called VAPE that my family keenly uses during summertime in our cottage...

A guy entered, and I got hit by his hair's smell ( and probably his feromones too... ) from a few meters far and I felt weak in the knees instantly. He smelled like a forest after rain. I tried to get closer to him with each station passed. When he was only a meter away, I had to close my eyes and control facial expressions, while olfactive orgasm was ramping in my brain.

He got off just two stations too early to fill my appetite. Before the doors closed behind him, I hesitated to become his stalker for 'another round', but I really had to hurry up for the theatre. It was only a 'One station stand'.

I got off at the Sentier. ( I would love that but the word "sentier" has nothing to do with scent, it means trail or pathway in French. )

Olfactive Flashback IV.

I just bought lamb leather insoles. The boots I have fallen in love with in Cannes was only available in one size bigger than my actual size.

Hardly opened the packaging, when still from far, it hit me right on the nose.

The lamb leather insoles smells like concentrated hot milk in aluminium vessel. I was back to 5 (I think so far this is the earliest olfactive flashback I have ever had! Smells like a Guinness record!:). In the small village outside the map where my mum was born, we used to go to take milk from the producing factory near my grandmother's house. My mum's grandmother, who used to work there, always smelled like hot creamy milk, and I just realized why when I entered the production site in mind. Vapor of boiling milk everywhere, the steam was hot and suffocatingly intense. The lactic aromas in the air mixed with the sterilizing products used to clean the aluminium / tin vessels for the clients, before filling it with freshly pasteurized milk.

Get back in time took less than 1 second, but I spent the whole day on trying to recreate the hot milky scent in my head.