A perfume is designed to blend with your natural body odors to create a unique subtle scent that is your SIGNATURE. Anyone smelling it again, immediately thinks of you and all the good times you have had together in the past. Smell bypasses logic and goes straight to the emotion and memory centers of the brain. If you use so much that there is 99% perfume overwhelming 1% of your natural scent, it is like a song with only one note. It is flat. It is no longer uniquely you. It lacks subtlety.

Further, the nose tires easily. Any scent always present eventually disappears from awareness. You want a subtle scent that appears and disappears-that flirts with the apprehend-er, thus keeping his interest. To do that, you need the merest touch of perfume, so that it disappears and reappears only when you move, letting off a tiny burst of fragrance. Keep in mind that the smell of perfume by itself is not sexy. It is only in combination with your natural scent does it come alive. It is not a deodorant to cover up your natural fragrance.

As you get older, your sense of smell fades. This is why older people often overdose themselves with perfume. Don’t trust your own sense of smell to decide how much is enough. It will always smell less intense to you than it does to others and,, of course, it will smell nicer to you than to others since you picked the fragrance.

Beware particularly of reapplying because the scent has faded. It has not faded so much as your nose has become exhausted. In my opinion, old ladies more than young ladies should wear the perfumes.

Though perfumes don’t hurt everyone, certain perfumes can give some people migraines, nausea or mood-swings. We are gradually seeing a shift in attitudes. Hospitals are now asking visitors to refrain from using perfumes. The new thinking, fired perhaps by smoking, pollution and global warming concerns, is you don’t have the right to stink up the air from others. Ironically. perfume is supposed to make you more appealing. If you are using so much, it is making others ill, it is failing miserably for its intended purpose. People who use too much perfume tend to be self-centered. They presume that because their dosage of perfume smells good to them and does not make the nauseous, that it MUST be the same for everyone else. Common sense says: you should go extra light on your perfume for an airplane, train or bus trip, or any other time you will be confined with others, even a long elevator ride. It goes without saying.

A friend of mine from Russia kept her bottle of perfume for 41 years just because beautiful words were written inside the box. It was Sonnet #5 by W.Shakespeare:

“Those hours, that with gentle work did frame                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter, and confounds him there;

Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:

Then were not summer’s distillation left,

A LIQUID  PRISONER pent in walls of glass,

BEAUTY’S effect with BEAUTY were bereft,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Nor it, not no remembrance what it was:

But FLOWERS distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their snow; their SUBSTANCE still lives SWEET.”

Listen and watch video: Tatiana Gorodetskaya, 5 Sonnet by W. Shakespeare