Where should one apply perfume?

Wherever one wants to be kissed.

-Coco (Gabrielle) Chanel

Lately, I’ve been experiencing an intense olfactory overload. Everywhere I go, my nose encounters explosive waves of peony, jasmine, tangerine, vetiver, sandalwood and saffron in what seems like a gazillon exotic blends. “What’s going on? “I ask an expert “nose” behind the fragrance counter at Holts. She informs me that a master perfumer can distinguish an astounding 2,000 different scents and as many as 100 notes in any given perfume. Hmm… maybe my schnoz is trying to tell me something? 

The seductive power of fragrance goes back thousands of years. The word “perfume” comes from the Latin per fume “through smoke” – celebrating the ancient use of aromatic substances, the burning of incense and herbs as sacrificial offerings to the gods. The early Egyptians were famous for their use of tantalizing perfumes. Both women and men of fashion swirled in waves of heady bouquets, rose plants such as rose, lily, peppermint and henna. The decorated their elaborately coifed tresses with perfumed ornaments, embracing the wearer in an aura of enchanting scent.

Leave it to those fragrance-flirty Romans to use a different scent for each part of the body. To invite kisses they would first glaze their lips with musk unguents while aromatic spices gave breath an erotic flavour. And they didn’t stop there. They poured perfume on themselves, their guests, and their pets – favourite dogs and horses were massaged with it. Exotic scents were lavishly sprinkled on floors and walls. Cascades of perfumes spilled from fountains and baths, invoking an opulent-smelling ambience for sensual escapades.         

Romantic, floral, feminine, and high-born – the first whiff of European perfumery began in the sixteenth century when a Roman nobleman named Flavio Orsini, Prince of Nerola, presented his second wife Anne-Marie de la Trémoille-Noirmoutier with a new perfume made with the fresh blossoms of the orange flower. 

The essence quickly became known as Neroli perfume and was so successful that the princess decided to scent all her gloves with it. Fragrance-dipped gloves were believed to keep the hands dewy and soft  – and, therefore, more kiss-worthy. Possessing kissable hands was all the rage then as all social encounters required a gallant hand-kiss in both greeting and parting. It wasn’t long before the Neroli-perfumed gloves caught on in Europe. Suddenly, everybody wanted gloves of scented leather. 

During the Renaissance, Italy held centre stage for perfumery, and when the fierce and feisty Catherine de Medici was to be married to the future King Henry II of France, she transported her passion for perfumes with her. It was the beginning of the adventurous love affair France was to have with fragrance. And, for the first time, a woman didn’t have to be of an aristocratic birth to own a pair on scented gloves.

Nowadays, finding the right perfume is not always easy. But sensualists in the cult of smell seem to all agree that your signature scent should express your uniqueness, your confidence, your class. 

My advice? Just follow your nose.

Brad Pitt has one. So does Johnny Depp. Major league players Tom Brady and Ichiro Suzuki both have one. Even Spike Jonze wears one. And, by the looks of things, there’s never a bad time to rock a mo. Unless, of course, you belong to the hirsute-less gender. 

Would Rhett Butler have been so madly romantic without his moustache? Would Einstein have invented his theory of relativity had he been bare-lipped? (Okay, I am fully aware that none of Einstein’s theories were due to the gravitational phenomena of his mo, but, still, one has to wonder about the pull of such a  famous moustache.) And what about Salvador Dali’s flamboyant mo (said to be inspired by seventeenth-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez.) “Since I don’t smoke, I decided to grow a moustache,” the great surrealist artist once said. “It is better for the health.”  And for getting noticed, el presto! 

Let’s face it: a moustache can make a man stand out from the crowd. Whether it’s a short-term, weekend fuzz-buzz or a seasoned Cristiano Ronaldo (the most highest paid soccer player on the planet) look, sporting a moustache is the ultimate statement of masculinity. (What ZOOMER female can forget Tom Sellek in the ’80s television show Magnum, P.I.? )

From Hollywood’s early days, the moustache has been the embodiment of male virility. But attitudes toward men sporting facial hair have varied in different cultures throughout the ages. In ancient Egypt the moustache was regarded as the mark of high wisdom. The trend continued into the Greek civilization and endured until the fourth century BC when, Alexander the Great commanded his soldiers be clean-shaven. It was the Romans who instituted the practice of the daily shave. 

Even so, moustaches (and beards) of all sizes and shapes cropped up through the centuries, keeping pace with fashion. The classic ’stache went through a rough patch during the 18th century when it was whisked to the forefront of army style, and after 1830, it became the cachet of French revolutionaries. 

The era of emulating film stars in moustache and manner reached a new frontier in the 1920s with the arrival of a hirsute line of great lovers that began with Rudolph Valentino. 

Which brings me to my next point: Why does kissing someone who sports a moustache feel so wonderfully good (well…I’m assuming it feels kind of edgy and thrilling)? According to my informal survey with my ZOOMER pals, a moustache gives the “kissee” some extra tactile pleasures. 

We all respond to touch. Life itself could not have flourished without it. Touch is the first sense to develop in fetuses; they have been filmed sucking their own hands, and stroking their umbilical cords. After birth nursing is made possible by the guidance of the sensitive touch cells in the lips.

The final seduction, however, is attributed to a potent hormone called oxytocin. As it turns out, oxytocin surges just at the thought of connecting with a partner. Thus every kiss – with or sans moustache – has the potential to synchronize a chemical choreography of memorable moments.

Just go with the mo.

She was enveloped in her clothes as if by the delicate,

distilled apparatus of an entire civilization.

-Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past 

Didn’t make it on Canada’s Best Dressed List? Join the thousands of coast-to-coast fashion-culturati who, inspired by their favourite writers, are focusing the reading light on what is haute and what is naught in the context of verse, redefining the national SQ (Sartorial Quotient). 

Whatever the pattern of seasonal collections, poets and writers have always managed shake up the style status quo by mixing the sensuality of fabrics and dyes with the forces of nature. Here, in The Material World, the French writer Emile Zola (1840-1902) takes his often low-on-cash-high-on-style readers on an unforgettable sartorial sojourn:

Fine-spun satins and delicate silks gushed forth first: the satins a la Reine and the Renaissance satins, in the pearly tones of spring water; lightweight silks with crystal clarity — Nile green, Indian azure, May rose, Danube Blue. Then came the more substantial materials: marvellous satins, duchess silks — warm-hued, rolling in great waves. And, at the bottom, as if in the basin of a fountain, slumbered the heavy fabric — the figured weaves, the damasks, the brocades, the beaded and lame silks — upon a deep bed of velvets… creating with their kaleidoscopic patches a motionless lake upon which reflections of sky and landscape seemed to dance.

In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) uses the same imagery in chronicling the movements of a woman’s corset, playing up the voluptuous curves of the female body: “Out of the tremendous froth of trains, pleatings, lace, and flounces which waved and undulated, scandium artem, at every movement of the bearer, the waist would shoot up like the chalice of a flower.”

Not one to be upstaged, the super-sophisticate Marcel Proust (1871-1922), takes the whole affair of fashion much more seriously. In a famous passage from his Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator contemplates the aerial hues of a gown worn by a woman to whom he is hopelessly in love:

If…I found the Duchess swathed in the mist of a grey crêpe de Chine gown, I accepted this aspect of her which I felt to be due to compels causes and to be quite unalterable, and I steeped myself in the atmosphere which it exhaled, like that of certain late afternoons cushioned in pearly grey by a vapourous fog; if, on the other hand, her indoor gown was a Chinese red with yellow flames, I gazed at it as a glowing sunset; these garments were not a causal decoration alterable at will, but a given, poetical reality like that of the weather, or light peculiar to a certain hour of the day.

Following Proust’s example, the American poet B.G. DeSylva (1895-1950), spins a cosmic dress for his beloved his Fabric of Dreams:

I’m weaving a dress for my lady

Out of the fabric of dreams;

Fashioned of twilight,

Sewn with the shy light

Of the stars and the moon’s fragile beams;

Clasped with a girdle of dawning,

Rainbows to cover the seams.

Ultimately, our apparel reflects one of our most vital needs: namely, to communicate who we are. Through the medium of clothes and visuals, our desires for fulfillment are enacted. Perhaps, Virginia Woolf (1883-1971) was right when she said: “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes… change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”