In praise of bad perfume

If I had to name my least favorite mass market scent, I'd probably say ET White Diamonds. There are plenty of other perfumes that can claim huge and inexplicable popularity, but White Diamonds has a ferocious sillage that puts it a cut above the rest. There's no escaping its dense, distinctive fog, so suggestive of a wedding bouquet fried in chicken fat. To be fair, I don't think it was always as bad as it is now. In its early years (the 90s), I found it mediocre but inoffensive. I own a mini of it from those days, and the scent of that juice seems mellower than the aroma today's wearers leave in their wake. Maybe the formula has changed, or maybe I'm just indulging in the reflexive nostalgia that afflicts most perfumistas. In any case, I always hold my breath a little whenever I get stuck near a White Diamonds dowager, and make a mental note to go easy on my own obnoxious favorites (Miss Balmain, Fracas, etc.) so as not to perpetuate the cycle of suffering.

Last Friday, I was in the supermarket around 2 in the afternoon, and the store was crowded with old folks. (Strange, that, since senior discount day is Wednesday. Maybe they were giving the oldsters an early chance to shop safely, since this is Thanksgiving week, when no sane person enters a supermarket without pepper spray and a firearm.) I was scanning the shelves for club soda when the first cloud of White Diamonds engulfed me. I looked up to see a lady in a wheelchair cruising toward me, pushed along by her hired attendant. Her white hair was carefully curled. Her lips and nails were bright pink, as was her velour tracksuit. I grabbed my club soda and moved on to the cleaning aisle, where I found the sweet fragrance of Comet and Fabuloso competing with the scent of a superannuated redhead toddling along after her middle-aged daughter. She was wearing polyester slacks, a pearl-buttoned sweater, Easy Spirits and meticulous make-up along with her White Diamonds.

I had an impulse to flee from her, too, but instead I stayed put for a moment and watched her out of the corner of my eye. She was a bit feeble and her daughter was being grumpy with her, but you could tell she was a woman who still took a lot of pleasure in living. She put thought and effort into how she presented herself, which takes some courage in a culture that despises old people and would like to erase them from view. Her perfume made her defiantly, undeniably present to everyone she encountered; perhaps not exactly as she imagined it did, but then, what do any of us know about how the world perceives us?

Good for her, I thought, and all her aromatic sisters. They should keep spritzing White Diamonds as long as they have strength to work the nozzle. They should make the family give 'em gift sets for Christmas so they can layer the stuff. May they hang onto pleasure until their last days, and never surrender the juice until it's pried out of their cold, dead hands.


Portrait of the Empress Dowager Ci'an, c. 1850