We who are sensitive to chemical fragrances must deal with more issues than just planning our travels to include places where we can sleep and breathe in comfort.

The assault on the sense of smell from every direction is a very serious modern problem.  Fragrances are added to … well, once it’s added to toilet paper (which it sometimes is), you can pretty much say that companies will add it to anything and everything.  I mean, come on, is scented toilet paper there for you to “enjoy” the scent while you’re sitting on the can with the toilet paper roll a few inches away from your face?  Or is the real reason to enhance the wiping action?  You know … to make the poop a little less offensive to your nose on its short journey into the toilet bowl?  Is that it?  Or is the appeal in knowing that you’re wiping a scent onto your butt?  And if so, is that for the benefit of the next person who sniffs it?  How thoughtful!

One of the most offensive fragrances in the world is one of the oldest, possibly the oldest of all.  It’s the scent that people add to their actual bodies: perfumes.  Well, to be precise, it would be an improvement if the skin of their bodies were the ONLY place that people drenched themselves with perfume.  But it’s usually applied AFTER one is finished dressing, not before.  It’s the final touch to make absolutely sure that you will offend someone when you go out.  It’s not just on their skin, which is then covered up by clothes; it’s on the outside, ON the clothes … ready to rub off onto other things in the world.

In California, where I live, it is very common to hug people when saying hello or goodbye; even with people you don’t know very well.  Not everyone likes hugging, but I do.  Except now I have to make a point of asking if they are wearing any perfume or colognes, because there have been WAY too many instances where, after hugging, I’m instantaneously wearing the perfume on myself.  And I “get to” smell it all night, which means I get to feel nauseous and unhappy all night.  Thanks so much for your consideration!  And if I was hoping to wear any of those clothes another time before laundering them … that hope is over.  After being perfume-bombed, I’d be more inclined to burn them. 

RESPONSE       Why not just go home and change if it bothers you that much? 

Well, let’s think it out: how far am I from home at this point?  More than an hour?  Am I out of town and this is the ONLY thing I have to wear?  Am I at an event that I’ll now miss if I take the time to go home and change?  And if I do take the time, don’t forget that I’m not just changing clothes, I MUST take a shower to get the offensive stench off my skin.  Oh, right, and to seal the perfume-contaminated clothes in a plastic bag so they don’t stink up the place where I live; otherwise I will smell the stink instantly upon coming home and opening the front door.

My partner, Harvey, and I recently visited someone we’re close to, a relative of his, a woman whom we both love dearly.  I’m still not in the habit of doing this, so it was the very first time I remembered to ask – BEFORE hugging – if the person I was about to hug was wearing perfume.  Answer: yes.  So, no hug for me.  But it was Harvey’s cousin, and he wasn’t about to not hug her after driving over an hour to see her. 

Now it’s post-hug, and her perfume is all over Harvey’s clothes.  I drove us all to the restaurant where we went for brunch, with her sitting in the passenger seat.  So, of course, the perfume rubbed all over the car, including the seatbelt, ensuring that later, on an entirely different day, the perfume on the seatbelt would still be there to rub anew onto Harvey’s entirely different clothes. The stuff is tenacious.  There never seems to be less of it on the part it was rubbed from; instead, there seems to be twice as much of it:  on the original source, and now on whatever rubbed against it, both equally offensive to the nose (and lungs).

It wasn’t the cousin’s particular brand of perfume that was the problem; I find ALL chemical perfumes horrible and disgusting.  I suppose I should have been thankful that it wasn’t worse – to be sure, I’ve smelled some that give brand new meaning to the word “vile.”  The weird thing was that we had visited her before, many times.  She’d been in the car before.  Why was it so different this time?  Was the perfume itself worse?  Have I become even more sensitive to fragrances?  It doesn’t really matter what the answer is, because either way, I find it intolerable.

At the time of this writing, it’s two days after the cousin visit, and I am still catching whiffs of the offensive substance in OUR apartment.  Not to mention that the stench got all over the car as well.  I had seat coverings, which I washed with an all-purpose cleaner yesterday.  Today I could STILL smell it, so I removed the coverings and threw them into the garbage.  (Maybe it was a blessing that the seats were covered in the first place.)  But a huge problem remains: the smell isn’t coming out of the passenger seatbelt, so I’m going to have to cover it with paper towels and secure it with gaffer’s tape.  (A friend who also detests fragrances warned me to check the seatbelts whenever I rent a car, because if the previous driver was wearing perfume and I don’t check first, well, now I’m wearing it, too.  Little did I ever suspect that the same fate would visit my own car.) 

Have you ever been in a situation where, for some amount of time longer than a minute, you were forced to be someplace where someone had vomited?  Like, even if the vomit had been cleaned up as well as possible, you still got pervasive telltale whiffs of it?  That’s what smelling perfume is like to me:  it is EXACTLY like smelling vomit.  And when it’s in your car, here’s some good news:  you get to smell it for as long as you have to be in your car.  Like an Uber driver stuck with the stench because a passenger threw up in the car (a common occurrence, I understand).  Hope it’s a short trip … oh, right, but then you’ll certainly need to use the car again in a matter of hours, and the stench will still be there.  This made me wonder:  which would I rather smell, the stench of vomit or the stench of perfume?  I thought long and hard.  My conclusion:  they’re both the same to me.  Let fate make that decision, which it always does anyway. 

So now I’m forced to be The Bad Guy.  You know, the asshole control-freak who has to check to make sure no one is wearing perfume or cologne or deodorant, the latter two of which are just as offensive as perfume.  Oh, wait a second, I already hear the objections:

RESPONSE       No deodorant??? 

Yeah, no deodorant!!!  Or if you must wear it, buy unscented deodorant, of which there are PLENTY of brands.) 

RESPONSE       But what if I have body odor?  Now I’m being just as offensive as the people wearing fragrances.

Are you?  Will I still smell your body odor on my clothes after we hug, IF we hug?  Will I still smell it in the car two days later if I give you a ride?  Also, isn’t perfume in France so popular because the French have a habit of not bathing very often, and they wear perfumes to cover their body odor? Which it doesn’t, it simply presents the dual olfactory assault of body odor unsuccessfully masked by a chemical fragrance.

Are there enough of us who hate perfumes that we can rise up and start a movement to get people to stop wearing them?  After all, it was done with smoking. 

RESPONSE       But perfumes have been around since 3300 B.C.*  You can’t change something so deeply entrenched in our culture.

Can’t we?  Smoking has been around since 5000 B.C.*. That’s 1700 years longer, and the anti-smoking movement managed to radically change people’s smoking habits in a tiny fraction of time.

* According to the results of an extremely quick internet search.

Maybe, like smoking, we can have designated perfume areas.  “You must stay in this confined space if you are wearing perfume or cologne.”  The designated perfume area in my place is outdoors, at least half a mile away.  By all means, enjoy your perfume from that distance all you want!  Just don’t be fooled into thinking that anyone else likes the crap you’ve rubbed on yourself.  Perfume is for the pleasure of the wearer of the perfume ONLY.  Maybe for their companion, if they even care. 

But basically, you’re imposing your stink on everyone else.  It’s NOT appreciated.  When you wear perfume in public, you are going to ruin someone’s experience.  Or maybe even, like what I’m going through right now, you’ll ruin their whole week.  So next time you’re heading out for the evening, why not skip the perfume and rub your (or someone else’s) vomit all over yourself instead?  Rest assured, they’re equally appealing to me!

***