The Sweet Smell of Success

Right. After the realisation yesterday that my life is in ruins and I’ve got some serious rebuilding to do, where better to start than with my perfume? If the adverts are to be believed, I can totally transform my life with just a few squirts. I will become beguiling, strong, powerful and beautiful. Men will buy me flowers, I will dance in sunlit orchards and New York will lay itself at my feet. Bring it on.

I bought the latest issue of Marie Claire, made a coffee and flipped through the pages. Which one should I choose? Thierry Mugler claims I will ‘Feel Extraordinary’ if I use his Alien perfume. Alien? Really? I already feel strange and alienated enough thanks to MS.

Giorgio Armani has bottled ‘the secret code of women’. Eh? What the heck does that mean? I don’t want my new perfume to be secret – I want it to shout success, status and sassiness.

Lancôme says ‘life is beautiful, live it your way’. Well, my way hasn’t been working so far. Dolce & Gabbana proclaims that it’s perfume is ‘the one’. The one what? Banana? Escada is on the right track with ‘create your world of happiness’, but ruins it with a woman (child) posing in a rose garden. Not very empowering. And she’s too thin. And too pretty.

My favourite one is Boss Pour Femme with ‘this will be your night’. Now you’re talking. But I think I would like at least a few weeks, not just one night. I much prefer the Boss perfume for men. Ryan Reynolds (who?) says, ‘I don’t expect success. I prepare for it’. That’s pretty serious business. The one that made me fall about laughing though is Chanel No 5. You know, that one with Brad Pitt (Brad, why??). There’s an advert on telly, half shot in black and white and it is quite possibly the most pretentious perfume advert ever made. It ends with him saying, ‘inevitable’. Words fail me.

Maybe I need to run the dreaded perfume hall gauntlet in town, try out some new scents. I could collect lots of those dinky cards they give you then sit in a cafe and have a little think and a sniff. Knowing me though, I will end up looking like Hannibal Lecter working out which perfume Jodie Foster is wearing. My quest continues…

 

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