There should be a Perfume Awareness Day. We could all have little cards that we could hand out to offenders that say something like, “You may not be aware of it, but your perfume/cologne is way too stinky, and you need to stop wearing it.”
It would be a public service.
Every day is Perfume Awareness Day!
Mr. S can’t walk through the entrance to big mall department stores without holding his breath. The stench aggravates his allergies too badly.
JFTR, I hate, hate, hate all perfumes, colognes, after shaves, whatever else ya calls em!
I won’t go in a store that is postioned so that I can’t help but walk by the perfume counter and its snipers.
I have backed up from friends, co-workers etc. because the stench was too much. When I’m asked what’s wrong I’ll just say their perfume, whatever, makes my eyes water.
I hate most perfumes and colognes. What people don’t realize, I think, is that their lovely perfume is a horrible smell to me and a whole bunch of other people. I don’t think you could name a perfume or cologne that isn’t hated by someone in a crowd.
Heck, never mind Perfume Awareness Day - how about going whole hog and just doing away with perfume and cologne? We don’t need them anymore - people bathe and shower enough now to make them superfluous.
You’ll take my Chanel No. 5 from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands 
That being said, I am a “considerate perfume wearer”. A spritz on each wrist and that’s it. I even have a private office and no one ever comments on “wow - it smells good in here - what are you wearing?”
I can understand your discomfort, however, and if I were in a cube or other close quarters situation and someone was allergic, I certainly would refrain.
Would that some smokers would do the same things.
VCNJ~
Let’s call for restraint instead of doing away with it. I use oils myself, which are really subtle. I live with one of you guys - he’s allergic to anything strong and doesn’t like more than a whiff. So I find the oils are very mild and non-bothersome to his poor nose.
I’m a semi-regular visitor to a store named Myer here in Melbourne that has a fabulous perfume department that allows you to sample their wares on yer’wrists or your neck (or even under your pits if you are so brazen!!). Good perfumes too, not just the el-cheapo crap.
But walking in to the department is worse than hell, and I do wonder how the people who work there are able to withstand the olfactory onslaught that must totally screw up their sinuses and their allergy systems. I can barely last two minutes in the store without getting a bad case of the OHMYGOD’S, so how they can work 8 hours, five or six days a week is beyond my comprehension.
:eek:
I can understand that too much perfume is overwhelming and that it certainly can aggravate allergies/asthma, but honestly I’d much rather smell someone’s over application of perfume/aftershave than be around someone with bad BO! That being said, patchouli makes me retch, even the tiniest amount of it (it smells like wet earth to me, and -not- in a good way!) FTR, I do wear perfumes, but only a small amount and many days I just use essential oils (sandalwood is my favorite).
I too love my perfume, but I’ll change scents every couple of years so that I’ll be aware of how much to use. Over time, we become too accustomed to our scents and we’ll automatically use more so that we can smell it. Forgetting that everyone else isn’t used to the smell. Rule of thumb: If you are not hugging me, you shouldn’t be able to smell me.
There’s one girl in my office who just marinates. You can follow her scent trail throughout the building. “Hmmm it smells like fermented lemons in the elevator hall. Gena must have gone to the break room.”
These are the worst offenders. All of the rest of you who wear perfume and think you’re not offending anybody, I have bad news for you - you probably are. I am what could be considered a super-smeller (in my nose, thankyewverrymuch, not my BO), and one person’s light application is my “Holy crap, that’s strong!” That’s just the people around you with excellent senses of smell, not even taking into account the people with asthma, allergies, and pregnancies which can have smell-activated nausea.
(kambuckta, sampling perfumes is the norm here. They’ll even give you a tiny little vial to take home often.)
I rarely bother with any kind of smelly additives, but when I do, I also use oils. I smell them when they go on, and then they’re just about gone. Only people who are waaaaay too close to me can identify it–otherwise, it’s just a pleasant waft that may or may not be coming from my direction. In addition, I usually use a cinnamon, ginger, or vanilla scent. I find that smelling a little bit like cookies makes people friendlier.
“Nice perfume. Must you marinate in it?”
that’s the rule by which i try to live …
I have a new perfume that I loooove – it’s a very light scent, though, of strawberries and vanilla and almond. Yum!
I put one spritz at my collarbone, and then I put one spritz in a dollop of lotion which gets spread all over my hands/arms. That’s it.
You can identify that the scent is coming from me if I’ve just put it on, but that’s the only time. Haven’t had any complaints so far, and I know to resist the temptation to put more on just because I can’t smell it anymore. My assistant and I have standing orders with each other to say something if the other has too much perfume or makeup on, or if there’s a piece of spinach in teeth, etc. So she’s got my back.
A story of one powerful cologne, or “kill-ogne”. :rolleyes:
I came back to the office from lunch one day a few months back and found people coughing, swatting the air and holding their noses. I’ve worked there for years and everyone is comfortable with everyone else, so I spouted loudly, “What the HELL is that ungodly STINK!?”
Everybody thought that someone had dropped and broken a bottle of cologne that perhaps they’d been carrying in their purse or knapsack, whatever. The overpowering stink was emanating from the men’s room, and we all thought someone had gone in to “touch up” and ended up dropping and breaking the bottle. No one owned up to it, and puzzlingly enough, a “smell” check (done surreptitiously, of course, just by going from office to office to see if anyone had green stink lines floating around them) revealed none of the co-workers I stopped by to see were the offending stinkers.
It happened several more times, which naturally clued us in that this was no accident. But what had us all scratching our heads was, who the heck WAS it?
Turns out it was a guy who worked for our company but in another program and who happened to have an adjacent office. He frequently used our bathrooms, apparently. Hence the “stink and run”.
Office manager put a stop to it REAL quick once we determined who the skunk was. Privately, the office manager told me after conversing with the guy’s boss that apparently this guy was “down on his luck” and it was suspected he was using the men’s room in our building to, ahem, bathe. Or what passed for bathing, meaning he doused himself so heavily with cologne (which a co-worker later confirmed was Drakkar -ack!!) that it literally drove people out of the office to the sidewalk outside to get fresh air. :rolleyes:
Thankfully Senor El Stinko doesn’t come over here anymore and we are all breathing easier. The big bosses instituted a “no fragrance” policy, and we are all thankful. 
Why is it that the biggest person who wears the most cologne/perfume in an inappropriate manner (entire body dipped into it) also has the stinkiest signature scent?
GAH…I still gag at the meer memory of a huge client we had that was about 6’10 and whatever his cologne was …(i’ve never come across it willingly before or since) it was like a mixture of OFF and Nail Polish Remover with a hint of brute or old spice or something. It was vile.
The man literally filled not only our office, but our entire building up with his stinky waft.
I printed up my employer’s guidance on the wearing of perfumes (“please don’t”)and taped it up by the coffee maker.
It was taken down by persons unknown by the end of the day. :mad:
Is that Angel perfume?
Would that our head of group would do something similar. One of my officemates appears to practically marinate himself in his cologne – you can smell where he’s been because his cologne just lingers everywhere. However, it would appear that I’m the only one who finds this annoying/illness inducing. Not one of my officemates thinks he’s wearing too much, whereas me, I can tell when he walks into the office – and my back’s to the door. Gah.
Try working with a woman who wears so much Cover Girl (as in, makeup) that she leaves a scent trail outdoors.
I like some perfumes, but even putting just a little bit on will eventually make my eyes start to burn. I wear a nice gingery-grapefruity body spray that you can’t smell unless you put your nose on my skin, which my co-workers tend not to do.