Over The Edge of Reason: Adventures in Perfume

I love perfume. Lately I've been obsessed with L'Air De Rien, the perfume created by niche house Miller Harris with Jane Birkin. When I happened upon the extremely hard-to-find body cream in the line in a  gardening shop in Berkeley, I couldn't resist an experimental smearing of myself with it.  It was 1960s skanky in just the way you'd hope la Birkin would be, but it was also smelled too much of hair, too much of Nag Champa, too much of too much.  I hopped back in my car, glad not have fallen in love and had to fork over the money for it.

Halfway home, the scent turned into something else entirely (as all good perfumes ought to) and suddenly it was the comfort scent I've been chasing for years: a funky, familiar umami (described by one perfume blogger as halitosis and by the great perfume critic Luca Turin as soiled underwear) that used to underlie a certain shampoo I loved to smell in my schoolmate's hair.  It smelled exactly like Leslie Feist's voice sounds on the Let It Die album.

S. took a whiff of me and said I smelled like old ladies.  A reasonable woman would put the scent far, far from her mind, non?  You'd think so, but after battling with my will for a full day, my lust for L'Air de Rien overcame even my interest in being desirable and I ran back to the shop and buy myself a jar.

I've owned it for a week and I try to use only the teeniest smudges at a time so as not to gross out my husband, but I can't help it: the stuff is just exactly what I want to smell -- and every time I do, I feel happy.