Here's a scent predicament: "I am spotty and ugly and tired of wanking: Which scent will make women fall at my feet?* COME ON, HELP ME OUT HERE." Fortunately, that was a friend of mine's joke after he read part one of this column.
I hate to be a killjoy, but the idea behind part one was indeed that no scent is your ticket to fantasy. Bummer. Still, though, yeah baby, here it is--laydeez nite! Whaddya wear when it's party time and you want to meet someone out there who's into a suave and sexy fantasy drama? Come on, help me out here is right!
XtremeScents to your rescue then, because there is indeed fragrance in seduction. Further, apprehensions and worries about scents and getting tail are just not the XtremeScents way. Let's start with two quick ideas:
1) from part one: a scent has gotta be familiar to her (so she knows you're wearing a scent), but not too familiar (risk of wearing what everyone's wearing). Impossible to find the line between these.
2) Most men over apply fragrance anyway, and more is not a good thing, writes a female friend of mine. Dontcha hate this worry? [Maybe link to sin of too much scent column here] The fragrance, any fragrance, should tantalize and tease and ultimately invite. Nice words, but yeah right--which one does that for sure?
So fragrance can get your member put through a wringer those ways or others. Worse, you can walk on eggshells when you fear you've made the wrong scent choice. No bigger killjoy than eggshell strolls. And killjoy, my friends, is not the XtremeScents way.
So what's the recipe? Forget familiarity. Forget tantalizing balance. Instead, freak out and go further. Here's how to do it.
Icebreaker
It is best to be a little nutty at a party. It is best to wear a funky, loud, and color-broadcasting shirt. Or maybe a 40-year-old red and black paisley Rat Pack tuxedo jacket, as I prefer. At a party you have to make something quirky about your appearance. Why? So that SHE'LL have something to notice about you and ask you about, d'oh.
The Rat Pack tuxedo jacket gets da laydeez to have something to say to me. My next stop: What's your name?
Say we're standing in the line to get to the punch bowl, or it's my turn to pump the keg, or I'm the quickest one to go get paper towels for the inevitable spill. During one of those moments, to fill the silence, one of da laydeez boldly steps out from the crowd: I like your funky paisley tux jacket, she says. Famous first words.
It's just a little something I use to show what a wild and crazy guy I am, I self-deprecatingly reply, What's your name!?
The ice isn't only broken, it's shattered, dudes! Wild-and-crazy guy time, and sure as the sun is going to rise the next day, she's coming over to my place that night for breakfast the next morning. Cha-cha-cha!
This is what you do with party fragrances. Pick something out there, something funky, something reserved for lightheartedness, irony, comedy, and sheer silliness. Silly enough to use as an icebreaker: she'll say something smells very much like candy around here, or animals, or decay, or the seventies, or vanilla cake, or just plain delicious, or something reeks, or whatever type of smell you pick for your funky icebreaking party scent. Then you can say yes, you sure think it is funky too, and you couldn't stop smiling when you first smelled it from the bottle, and while you wouldn't wear it to the office or anything, you think it is so funny and amusing that you wear it to parties as part of cutting loose.
Ice shattered and you're just like me! Now the two of you have got a whole conversation about the power of scent sitting right in front of you. Next she wonders about the fragrances you have for real-world use. Next you get to ask her what she likes to wear. Next you get to ask her how she got to be so beautiful. Cha-cha-cha, baby!
For icebreaking-category scents I might use:
Oyedo by Diptyque (lemon and orange hard candies);
Ofresia by Diptyque (magnificent and odd smell of grassy fields in summer sunlight, but is really heavy to pepper and freesia);
Dzing! by L'Artisan Parfumeur (amazingly sensual animalistic furry hide);
Baime by Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier (absolutely beautiful and delicious basil scent);
Voleur de Roses by L'Artisan Parfumeur, Opôné by Diptyque, Patou Pour Homme by Jean Patou, or Hammam Bouquet by Penhaligon's, all of which are rose scents, because roses smell magnificent, and masculine rose scents kick the bud of curiosity into the ladies's brains.
Passage d'Enfer by L'Artisan Parfumeur or Kyoto by Comme des Garçons (both are incense scentssmelling like warm wafts and altars spurs a strong association and a ready someone smells really nice here icebreaker).
Bulgari Black by Bulgari (Odd. Rubber and vanilla. Very nice, and no button-down-Joe or your uncle's fragrance. What's that? is first reaction, and second, once a close sniff to get the vanilla happens, is yeah, that's nice.
This is the trick: have a sense of levity and humor in looking at fragrance and using it. Don't think on your own about what scent will get you tail, think about fragrance like anything else you assemble for your life. Do you ask your friends which tee-shirt will get you laid? If you see a cool lamp for sale do you think that lamp is going to get me laid? No, you don't. You hope da laydeez will see the lamp and respect your taste picking it instead of any other of the boring lamps you could have picked. Look at scent the same way. Get a party or going-out scent. Make it crazy. They don't like it? Tough luck for them, and a shrug for you. They'll think it's provoking that you took a stab at it and have a scent for craziness though, and that'll show taste and make them want to know more.
All you have to do is break the ice and have a thoughtful and engaging reflection. She smells something walking by you, it isn't going to cut the mustard, much less the ice, when all you have to say is, Yeah, baby, that's me. Think how much better it is to say, Hey, thanks! My former alter boy friends say it reminds them of how they hated Sunday mornings. Or something smarter than I can think of right now. Compare the scent to something, some thought it makes. Tell a story about it. A smell alone can't and won't make them want you.
Curiosity and creativity
This is an extension of the break-the-ice method described above. It depends on multiple dates and multiple fragrances. The idea? Freak her out every time. Here's how it works.
First, remember that scents on you are images and associations in people's minds. Some smell like exotic places, languorous lands of the lotus and all that. Some smell like you've been working hard in the fields (or cutting the grass). Some smell like shade, some like sunshine. Some even make the smeller think of summer while it is winter outside, or like dry heat when the weather is actually humid. Using this palate you can smell different each time you get together. Each time demonstrating an aura powerfully loaded with different associations from the last time. Where have you been? What have you been doing? Why do you smell like no one else? You remind me of outdoor spice, fruit, and vegetable markets--why do you smell this way?
This way, with creative choices of fragrances, you can manufacture her curiosity about your personal space, and thus about you. The fragrances you choose have to be unusual and beyond the common mass-market scents she already knows. It's all right if she recognizes that the exotic smell on you is a cologne, but you have to pick one that she'll simultaneously think is different from other colognes she knows. If she remarks that it certainly is different, it launches you into a whole conversation, and she can also be curious about what you'll smell like the next time the two of you get together.
What are good potions to make her curious about why you smell that way or where you've been? Guerlain's Habit Rouge. This one is famous and has been around many years, but it is not in the familiar realm for lots and lots of da laydeez. To me it smells of the still, shady air under old wooden beams and planks. Sun dried solid wood while a gravel-filled construction site is nearby. The sweetness and cold pillow dampness of freshly unrolled paper is there too, kind of like sweet incense smoke and its dried ash blown around by passing breezes.
Another is Lorenzo Villoresi's Spezie, which I've used on dates to manufacture curiosity. It smells like dry spices, red and warm in sunshine. The smell of touching many spices to sample them, show them, run them through your fingers, or crumple their dried leaves to judge their grade of quality. The dryness of your fingers afterward, and the colored-powder smudges your fingers leave on paper pads and the necks of pens you use. Awnings of cheap tarp, dust of burlap and threads of cheap twine. All this odor from the spray of a bottle--so unusual! Why would you smell this way, and what else is there in the smell? Maybe smelling it closer will give away more of its secret. Here is new meaning and impetus to the question of what did you do today?
Guerlain's Vetiver is also a master-of-imagery scent. Summer, squinted eyes from reflections on water or car windshields, acidic wines on summer evenings, and the back of the throat dryness that sudden hot air can bring. Also lemon--pith, peel, and juice--that seems ever-present and part of the very best things of summer.
She hates me
It is easy to write more simple lines about a few others that are utter masters of their aura: Annick Goutal's sweet, dry, beautiful powdery masterpiece Duel, which smells soft and comforting despite the sharp edge of its truckload-volume of black tea leaves. Comme des Garçons 2, which gives a dense putty-like incense smell on top of a deep nostril waft from an ink bottle. Perhaps last is Paco Rabanne's Ténéré, if you can find it. It is redolent of flower stems smudged, gooey and sticky, on your fingers and the decay and moss on stems you've left in a flower vase too long.
Smell like these and have them wondering, who--just plain who--is this guy?
This makes scents and romance together much better than if your fragrance had the power to make her thong-be-gone. When Marcel Proust bit into his tea-dipped madeleine, it probably tasted pretty good, maybe it was even beautiful to taste, but it was the memories and the association that the sensation unlocked in him that made him famous. Same with scent. A scent can be beautiful, but that doesn't go very far. Selecting scents is searching for, and making, and manipulating, Proustian moments for ourselves and others.
You can't just put on sugar and spice and have women--or men--become everything nice. Picking what will please someone's nose-buds is a gamble. Maybe what you pick will have catastrophic associations for her: maybe you'll smell like that time her car interior caught on fire, or when she walked through stale wet steam smoking up through sidewalk grates. (Comme des Garçons actually makes this, it's called Odeur 53). I don't know what's going to pop into anyone's mind, but picking a scent anyone is certain to like, much less make her want to get naughty, is worlds more difficult than saying hi how do you do.
But who knows. Might be you'll be at laydeez nite or a party and none of the women there will have good senses of smell. Maybe they'll all have head colds. Maybe you'll meet one and go on a dozen dates, putting on a provoking scent for each date, only to find out that she's had no sense of smell since birth. Finally the appealing thing about you is always you, not the mere surface of your scent.
Lastly, if she hates what you wear blame it on me. Just spell Basenotes.net and XtremeScents correctly. Complain that it's true you can't believe everything you read on the internet.
