The Scent of A Woman

I “met” CHANEL somewhere around the age that I began learning and falling in love with french. The glossy sheen of a sultry magazine add for ‘Coco Mademoiselle’ introduced me to the beautiful empire of the french designer. From a velveteen couch a brunette model gazed intently into the frame. She wore a lacy negligé-like dress that pressed to her body, showing off womanly curves and full breasts. At my young age I thought this woman herself was ‘the’ Coco Chanel, yet even though the elegant creature in the picture wasn’t the woman I would later come to idolize it left an impression on me that lasts to this day.

“Off all the human senses, smell is the most perfect” -Chanel

With this image came a dream and a realization: Perfume is an essential part of elegant womanhood. Though I admit the obvious influence of capitalist-consumer driven principles behind this, I’m able to romanticize it still. And the sheer ceremony of spritzing perfume in the morning as the final touch to my person before leaving my house and going out into public is a moment I take pleasure in every day.

A professor I studied with in Paris during the summer before my senior year in high school explained the magic of perfume to me while we waited in the metro together one day. An uncanny place to discuss elegant fragrance, I agree, but her words stuck with me. She explained “Quand j’oublie mon parfum c’est comme il y a quel que chose manqué..”- without her perfume she felt she was missing something. I paused in the humid summer metro-air to sniff lightly- to see if I could detect the Givenchy she just applied to her neck- it was faint, but present. There were many things about my french professor that terrified me- her wild red hair and tattooed eyebrows and the way she made me cry... twice. But though my professor and I may not have been soul mates, after the conversation concerning perfume I felt I understood something about womanhood that didn’t belong to just one culture, though I admit I think the french make the best perfume.