Tried “Dee” last night. Smelled woody. (Not woodsy. Like woods. The description includes rosewood.) Interesting wood with a hint of incense. It’s a nice smell, it’s also, oddly enough, a completely asexual smell, and if I’d meant “unisex” I would have said “unisex.” This is a perfume that does not make me think about sex, or being sexy, or whatever.

This was noteworthy, because for whatever reason–“You’re a raging pervert,” is an acceptable answer–I generally think of most perfumes in those terms. Would you want to smell like that in the bedroom? Is somebody going to sniff this and think “I want to lick that off?” You know. Arguably I am indeed slightly deranged, but smell is a very basic thing, as is sex, I think they’re often linked in the human brain. Pumpkin pie Whipped? You better believe I think about whether that’s sexy.

“Dee,” though…my brain doesn’t go “sexy.” However, it also doesn’t go “Unpleasant!” as it normally would. It’s not a turn-on. It’s not a turn-off. It just…exists. It’s a pleasant odor. It is a vague hermetic kinda smell, heavier on the books than the alchemy. I could see wearing this at home while I’m working, just as a kind of pleasant mood-elevator, but I don’t know that I’d wear it out on a date.

I am currently testing “Snake Oil.” I just applied it, and it smells, oddly enough, EXACTLY like the powder my grandmother used to use after the bath. I therefore do not think of it as an erotic odor, although I gotta say, the only way men would have fallen at Grandma’s feet any faster is if she’d used hand grenades, so possibly she was on to something.

Funny, though, about smell and memory–I haven’t thought of that powder for years, but it immediately takes me back to when I was a very small child and would take baths at her house, and she’d let me use the powder and her deodorant (a roll-on, very cold) in a bathroom with ceramic tiles of stylized orange pagodas framed and hung on the walls. And the time I snorted soap bubbles to see what they smelled like, and had to be taken to the emergency room with a nose full of bubble bath.

We’ll see how it smells in a few hours…

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