Us Weekly should provide a supporting scent option like John Waters’ Polyester scratch-and-sniff cards—I imagine notes of hair extension glue and polyester shapewear, rank with Adderall sweat.
What is the Best Smell?
Recently, just for sport, I wore colored contacts for a week and then asked my boyfriend if he’d noticed anything different about me. He had not. 😤
He didn’t understand why I was so shocked; eye color seemed minor to him. It’s true that eye color isn’t critical anatomical infrastructure, but as any clickbait celebrity slideshow demonstrates, it can be transformative. The only other seemingly subtle element that comes close in impact is smell. Fragrance changes nothing and everything. It’s an irresistible riddle to us seekers of pleasure and knowledge. We must know: which smell is the best?
Us Weekly should provide a supporting scent option like John Waters’ Polyester scratch-and-sniff cards—I imagine notes of hair extension glue and polyester shapewear, rank with Adderall sweat.
Sneakers smell good, but now so do the stores, thanks to scent branding. Nike’s scent was inspired by soccer cleats in dirt.
Sensory urbanism proponents want to consider all human senses when designing cities. This guy sounds like he’d be annoying if you worked in the Montreal tourism office, but if the city really does smell like “bagels being cooked over wood fires,” then he’s right that it should be celebrated.
Entry-level Odors
Many wonderful smells are just happy byproducts of everyday life. Gasoline, petrichor, new sneakers off-gassing, scented markers seemingly designed to teach kids how to huff. I enjoyed all these when I encountered them, but it was Chicago’s enchanted candyland aroma, courtesy of the Blommer chocolate factory, that inspired me to start trying perfume. Now that I knew what was possible, I could no longer accept an unscented life.
I started with baby basics: Bath and Body Works Freesia Body Splash, The Body Shop Perfume Oil in lilac, and free samples of Happy. Sweet, simple scents reigned supreme until I was paired up with Jackie and Stephen in a remedial college science lab.
Sneakers smell good, but now so do the stores, thanks to scent branding. Nike’s scent was inspired by soccer cleats in dirt.
Sensory urbanism proponents want to consider all human senses when designing cities. This guy sounds like he’d be annoying if you worked in the Montreal tourism office, but if the city really does smell like “bagels being cooked over wood fires,” then he’s right that it should be celebrated.
Happily for Jackie, sex supposedly no longer sells fragrances, which I think is sad. I’m in a girl-who-cried-wolf sexual phase; I enjoy the tactile stress relief of kneading up an erection, but am usually too lazy to deal with the consequences. I‘d like to at least live vicariously via some erotic advertising.
Whenever they came to my dorm to work on a doomed lab report, Jackie propped her feet up on my desk, slurped microwaved tomato soup, and paged through my magazines. A religious ex-homeschooler, she read them as intently as an alien boning up to go undercover among humans. Whenever she encountered a mildly racy ad, usually for perfume, she recoiled. “This is over the line,“ she’d say disapprovingly.
Meanwhile, Stephen, who was so tall that his head conveniently poked over the top of the shower stalls in the co-ed bathroom, relaxed on my beanbag chair, worked on a crossword, and shared unsolicited updates about his love life. At the mention of an “assisted orgasm” (his term for no-strings-attached hookups), Jackie would cover her ears.
Happily for Jackie, sex supposedly no longer sells fragrances, which I think is sad. I’m in a girl-who-cried-wolf sexual phase; I enjoy the tactile stress relief of kneading up an erection, but am usually too lazy to deal with the consequences. I‘d like to at least live vicariously via some erotic advertising.
Whenever people freak out about a Pitchfork review, I picture Stephen. I believe the perceived precision of the decimal system is what really triggers a troll. It casts the reviewer as an arrogant scientist instead of just someone offering a semi-informed opinion.
Stephen sometimes borrowed my computer to “look up a crossword clue.” Once I made the mistake of scrolling through the browser history afterwards. He’d posted aggressive comments on a music message board and then Asked Jeeves a few things:
what is it like to get shot
what is it like to get a blow job from a man vs a woman
I cleared my browser history and quietly dissociated until dinner.
One dark day, Stephen got a whiff of my vanilla body splash and said that it smelled good—or, rather, that I smelled “better than usual.” He was a disciple of the negging strategy, loath to give any woman an unadulterated compliment.
It angered me to have inadvertently provided him with even the slightest bit of pleasure. I should have been more careful—science has proven that little baby horndogs like vanilla because it reminds them of their mommies. As one study explained, “Sweet scents are familiar . . . they remind men of simple childhood days, so they feel secure enough to let their attraction and affection show.” Ew!
It was time to move on.
Whenever people freak out about a Pitchfork review, I picture Stephen. I believe the perceived precision of the decimal system is what really triggers a troll. It casts the reviewer as an arrogant scientist instead of just someone offering a semi-informed opinion.
you smell better than usual... you smell better than usual...
The online shopper’s version of Paris Syndrome is ordering a fragrance on the strength of its bottle and a few enchanting adjectives, only to open up something that smells jarringly different from what you’d imagined (bad). Sometimes, though, the bottles alone are worth it. I love these despite the actual smell; they’re so elegant that when I dust them I feel like my own maid.
False Prophets
It’s cruel when restaurants refill the Aesop bottles in the bathroom with industrial pink soap. It brings to mind the false promise of Chanel No. 5, a century-long scam of a Veblen good. Despite its elegant packaging, the fragrance itself just smells like the concept of perfume itself. It’s a generic chemical experience that says nothing about the wearer. Even if it did smell good, a scent isn’t only about the smell; look at Santal 33’s decline into ubiquity. A personal fragrance should suggest a unique story, add some mystique—like Calgon said, it should take you away. At most, Chanel No. 5 takes me to a Connecticut cul-de-sac where they don’t allow the landscapers to mow the lawn diagonally (too garish).
On the other end of the spectrum are overly literal gimmicks like the Demeter scent library. The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson said that humans “would rather believe than know,” and it’s on this basis that Demeter fails. With options like Graham Cracker, Paperback, and New Car, Demeter is something an astronaut on a one-way mission to Mars would pack to remember the smells of their home planet. Even for a generation raised on Gap Grass here on Earth, it’s too extreme (although I do think Earthworm is cute 🪱). It’s better to smell like the idea of grass than grass itself.
I didn’t know all this back when I banished my body splashes. Luckily, I met someone who did: Loren. She was a goddess one easel down in my painting class who blew my mind each time we spoke. Among other things, she‘d disabused me of my vague notion that the Donner Party had been a festive, Yuletide event and explained that the word “sitcom” came from combining the terms “situation” and “comedy.” I was humiliated to realize I’d been unwittingly using, like, industry jargon 🤮 my whole life.
It was ironic that Loren was the one to lead me into the world of high-end fragrance. Thanks to a nose job gone awry, she’d lost 90% of her sense of smell. But what Loren taught me went beyond fragrance; what she provided was a fundamental lesson in luxury. She was somehow from both New York and Bal Harbour, a place I recognized from the bottom of the designer ads that scandalized Jackie: NEW YORK • LONDON • MILAN • BAL HARBOUR • PARIS. Her New York home was in the luxe Olympic Tower, where the trash room, per this juicy history, “always smells like Santa Maria Novella.”
Despite her olfactory handicap, Loren always smelled good, but I couldn’t figure out how. There were no perfume bottles in her room. I’d sniffed all the shampoo bottles in her shower caddy, but hadn’t found a match. She had a cool, fancy scent, how I imagined a mink coat might smell after a night at the opera, resting in its climate-controlled storage closet, or maybe it was like a South Beach penthouse; undercurrents of Obsession, chlorine, tuberose, and central air.
Btw the best-smelling shampoo and conditioner is Dizziak.
I tagged along whenever Loren shopped at Barney’s. While she set up camp in the dressing rooms, I studied at the fragrance counter until I could identify a passerby’s scent with one sniff, like an apex predator. One day, drunk on dressing room champagne and overcorrecting from my splash era, I bought something stupid: Dior Poison. I didn’t think it smelled good, but I was blinded by the label. Loren wasn’t impressed. Even based on the bottle alone, she must have known that I couldn’t pull it off: it was an inappropriate choice for someone who didn’t own a single matching set of lingerie.
Loren had taken me as far as she could. I had to strike out on my own to find what was right for me . . . an antidote to Poison
Signature Scents
Claiming a scent as one’s own is the ultimate act of self-actualization. Even in sad phases of my life when I’m frumpy and bordering on spiritually deformed, fragrance is an accessible component of personal style. It requires no skill (unlike makeup), fashion sense (unlike clothing), money (just order samples), or energy (one lil spritz). Everyone should find their signature scent!
That said, there’s a fine balance to strike, the right mix of utter authenticity and striving to better oneself. Perfume is the moral equivalent of business casual. It can upgrade a person, but it can’t do magic. If I’d worn Poison, anyone in my proximity would have experienced a crushing dissonance, like when Elmer Fudd realizes that the beautiful woman across the room is just Bugs Bunny in drag. Something like the dearly departed Colette black musk oil would have been perfect for me; a healthy stretch, not delusional.
I love this perfume, although the extreme range of Sephora reviews makes me paranoid that it smells like Lysol to half the population, an olfactory version of the great cilantro divide. And Tom Ford is getting sort of corny, calling a perfume Lost Cherry and modeling another after the smell of a man’s crotch (a dangerous glamorization of what a crotch typically smells like!).
Smelling like something, someone, or somewhere else changes one’s context. If I’m standing in line at CVS but I smell of Neroli Portofino, that creates the blessed illusion that this grim fluorescent situation isn’t my primary life. I reek of elsewhere, and I’m making the statement that spiritually I identify as a sensual bohemian of the Italian Riviera rather than as a citizen-hag of CVS. As Nietzsche pointed out, we all need empowering fantasies in order to endure the horror of existence. It’s why I’m skeptical of the trend toward musky, neutral fragrances that are intended to amplify everyone’s individual inherent scent.
I love this perfume, although the extreme range of Sephora reviews makes me paranoid that it smells like Lysol to half the population, an olfactory version of the great cilantro divide. And Tom Ford is getting sort of corny, calling a perfume Lost Cherry and modeling another after the smell of a man’s crotch (a dangerous glamorization of what a crotch typically smells like!).
First of all, the sheer ego to believe that you smell better than, say, “the ultimate in femininity and freedom” (Hanae Mori Butterfly)! Second of all, the trend is a scam, the next generation of the pheromone love potions that I heard advertised when my school bus driver listened to Howard Stern. I do see some minor appeal in tricking someone into thinking you smell good, not just your perfume. It’s something that a sexy witch would do with all her vanity-top potions, at least until she invented vabbing.
Anyway, we can all spray on a little something, but the true signature scent is revealed the moment you step into someone’s house. It’s so telling! I work hard to keep my personal environment smelling fresh, scurrying around like a mom in a Febreze commercial. After a morning spent composing a scent story through a careful combination of the ceiling fan, my Goest Pablo candle, and a touch of Town Talk marble wax for sophistication’s sake, I will become violent if anyone goes near the microwave with ass-smelling leftovers.
There are thousands of products and recommendations for a good-smelling home, and it is heartbreaking how wrong people can be. One appalling Reddit thread is a good example of how dangerous misinformation spreads: “Try melting a Yankee tart in an oil burner. There's hundreds of available scents and I've not found one which smells uninviting. You've gotta go with Yankee and nothing else!”
I read it several times to be sure. It really said, “You’ve gotta go Yankee or nothing else!” This man has the whole internet at his disposal, and Yankee Candle is as far as he got? As Robert Browning said, “Ignorance is not innocence, but sin.”
Verdict
The best smell gives the sensation of eye contact with sexy baby Leo peeking out from under his bowl-cut bangs (AKA the best gif on the internet—that one’s a freebie). It makes anyone feel like a young surfer full of life. And our greatest minds, from Christopher Brosius to Kramer, are in consensus.
Yes, that’s right: the best smell is Hawaiian Tropic, advertised as “a rare blend of nature’s rich tanning oils.” The terminology only heightens the sense of destiny, as if the oils are not merely a byproduct of equatorial plants, but were created by God specifically to help white girls get some color—and to help all of us smell great!
🌸👃, Molly
P.S. For advanced users, I recommend pairing HT with our delish runner-up, Goe oil.
IN | OUT |
When they make mulch out of dead Christmas trees in the park | The smell of snow melting in an overheated entryway (it’s so sad) |
Parle Moi de Parfum’s Milky Musk | Baccarat Rouge 540 |
Leaving the parking brake engaged while driving to generate a natural burning-marshmallow aroma | “Auto fragrance,” no matter how bougie (carsickness hazard) |
A pack of menthols left outside overnight in humid weather | Lavender |
Your British boyfriend’s deodorant (he lives with his mom, but it’s in a manor so it’s worth it) | Creme Juul pods |
