Isn’t the point for other people to smell it? I thought that was why people wore perfume, because if you wear it all day, every day, you can’t even smell it anymore. It’s to be attractive to others, I would think, quixotic though that may seem.
When we were coming home from Xmas, I was completely gassed by two teenaged girls in the rest stop bathroom. First, they made me wait about 5 minutes to get to the sink because they were primping, and then, on their way out, they sprayed a massive cloud of some cheap ass body spray all over themselves that I guess is supposed to be alluring to teenaged boys. I had to walk through it to get to the sink and wash my hands. It smelled like feminine hygiene products to me, cheap and tacky. But damn! They unloaded a cloud of it, which by the time I got out to the front door, had filled the entire mini-mart with their stink. It made me feel a bit ill, and I smelled that reek on myself all the way home until I could change. Gross.
Do men find this sexy? I mean, why do people douse themselves in this stuff? Why is this such a huge industry? Someone must like it. I’m just not sure who, exactly.
Why do people use it? Because decades of advertising have told them that people are stinky and if you don’t wear scent you are going to be disgusting to everyone around you.
It’s worthwhile looking at old ads, from the 1800’s and early 1900’s. They were much, much franker than similar ads now.
I’ve always been sensitive to strong perfumes. I remember being a kid at church and some old bitty wearing a bottle of some really strong perfume would sit near me and I would start sneezing my head off and my nose would start running.
Now I have asthma and certain chemicals and smells trigger my asthma. I start coughing until I’m wheezing and I can’t catch my breath. It makes going out anywhere dangerous because cigarette smoke and perfume are so prevalent.
I don’t wear perfume but I do use a body spray and it never sets me off, no one else can smell it unless they are way too close. There is absolutely no reason for anyone’s perfume/cologne/body spray to be applied in such a manner that you can smell it more than a foot away from them.
Not trying to pick on you, and obviously you don’t have to answer, but why do you wear body spray? And how do you know no one else can smell it? That stuff is STRONG.
I’d imagine she wears it for the reason it was invented. Some people like to wear fragrance and she probably felt that a body spray would be lighter than a perfume, which was a good assumption.
I wear perfume every day, one squirt along the front of my neck and sometimes a spritz on the wrist. I’m 99.9% certain I’m not overpowering anyone with it, especially considering that I put it on in the morning and typically don’t interact with people until after noon.
But yeah, too much perfume is nauseating, I don’t care how nice the scent is.
I smell good. I mean, really good. I get 4-5 compliments per week (no, I’m not telling, it’s my secret) on how good I smell. Two sprays–one on the neck, and one split between the wrists. If I’m going to a club or somewhere with a lot of smoke, I might venture another half spray, but that’s pushing it.
I don’t buy the “I can’t smell myself” nonsense. I have an absolutely terrible sense of smell–I lived in a men’s dorm and it smelled like the Hilton to me. My olfactory is dead. But you know why children don’t pinch their nose and ask, “daddy, what’s wrong with him?” Before I started wearing cologne, I found someone who smelled nice, and asked how much they put on–“two sprays” I was told, and two sprays it has been ever since.
Really, the entire world should not be invited to drown in your perfume. It is infinitely better for a person to not even notice until they get close. It means that if they like it, they’ll have to get closer to you to enjoy it again. And if you keep it subtle, the closer they get, the better you smell. Win-win.
I’m allergic to a fair number of things - and two or three common chemicals in perfume are among those. I can’t sit near or be close to someone wearing a strong scent for more than a few minutes before my eyes start to water and my nose runs. If they are lucky, I won’t end up in a sneezing fit. It’s really not particularly pleasant.
I haven’t found a tactful, effective way to say “I am allergic to the reek rolling off you. Could you please move away, or perhaps have a shower?” When I do, I will be sure to let my fellow sufferers on the Dope know what it is.
Then again - it’s definitely true that a subtle, light scent can be very alluring. My girlfriend wears a tiny dab of BPAL on her neck, and another on her wrists - just enough that when I get close, it smells yummy. When I’m more than a foot or so from the sites of application, though, it’s no longer prevalent, so I can get away from it enough not to react badly.
The only time I can remember getting turned on by a woman’s fragrance was when a colleague was wearing something that smelled exactly like vanilla bean. Erotic as hell, I swear.
Is that why people wear it? I don’t much like that thinking; your right to smell like flowers are growing out of your arse ends where my nose starts. (Generic “your,” of course - I don’t know if you smell like flowers grow out of your arse, Ruby. )
What a waste of money - if you want to smell attractive to other people, bathe regularly and brush your teeth. That’s all it takes.
My theory is pretty much along the lines of what Jackmannii said. People put on cologne/perfume until they can smell it. It doesn’t matter that their sense of smell has gotten so burned out on it that they have to marinate in it to be able to detect it any longer.
I’ve worn the same cologne for 15 or 20 years now and I’m long past the point where I can smell it for more than 30 seconds after one shot to the chest. But I do get compliments on the way I smell so I’ll continue with one spray a day until forever I guess.
I’ve been allergic to perfume since I was a kid. Being in engineering means I seldom have a problem, but once a woman who never wore any put some on, and I had to attend from outside the door.
Mostly the two impacts are that I face down the people in the perfume counters of department stores who want me to sniff their chemical product, and we’ve saved a ton of money since my wife doesn’t wear any.
They want to smell nice. I imagine that, if they weren’t leaving the house at all that day, they wouldn’t bother, so they must want other people to also think they smell nice. The problem is, nice to you might be repugnant or overwhelming to me. Those cheap body sprays almost always smell horrible to me, which is why I can’t understand anyone using them to smell good. They smell chemical-ly and fake to me. The best perfumes do smell like flowers grow out your arse, or spices, or something natural, but even those, in excess, are nauseating IMO.
My goal, honestly, is to smell like nothing. Like you, I have a very acute sense of smell, which is more often a bad thing than good. I can smell myself, I can smell other people’s many different smells (perfume only lays on top of the other ones, it doesn’t erase them), and all the other wondrous and revolting smells around us. Often, things that are supposed to smell like perfume smell like chemicals and fakeness to me, so the only things I use that are scented are shampoo/conditioner, and if I could easily get those odor-free, I would. Unscented deodorant, unscented soap, lotion, detergent, etc. No perfume-- I could not tolerate it because, when it’s on me, it’s too overpowering. I got my husband to wear unscented deodorant too, and ditch the cologne. His natural smell is perfect without interference.
Some people really do need to use deodorant daily. Aside from that, I agree.
Another component of being attractive is looking like you care about your appearance, and smell is included. If someone smells cologne tastefully applied, it says, “I am trying”, which tells you something about their personality.
I recall research (sorry, can’t find a cite that doesn’t require registering at the moment) where the effect of women wearing perfume in professional settings, such as jobs and job-application settings, actually was negative, both on males and female observers.
Both males and females (but especially males) rated the women wearing perfume as less capable and less professional. The perfume also distracted the males somewhat from the factual content of the conversation. The differences were small and mostly semi-subconscious, but enough for me to stop wearing perfume to work.
It might be different if you are a woman and your job is to be “attractive”, say, a desk receptionist.
I was just thinking about this. One of the docs at work must sit in a bathtub full of it every morning. You can smell him coming and the smell stays for about an hour after he’s left. I’m reading a book about the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, and it’s made me really nervous whenever I feel like I can’t breathe or feel like I’m inhaling chemicals. This guy being in my office I’m just thinking “my lungs are imploding! I’m going to die! This wank is going to kill me!” What’s worse is I have to talk to him for longer than average because there is a serious language barrier problem and we have to go really slow.
He’s an MD, PhD so I don’t know how much clinical work he does if any. I can’t imagine he has a good reputation among human patients. It’s really bad.
Mom always said that people should be able to comfortably smell your fragrance while standing close to you but never as you are approaching and never after you’ve left.
Ditto, at least from more than a foot away. The hair products I use aren’t heavily scented, thank goodness (when I’m choosing hair products, I’m focused on performance, not scent. I’ve got difficult hair.) My anti-perspirant is as close to unscented as that particular brand gets. I do use cocoa butter body lotion, but again, it’s a mostly performance-based choice, although I do love the smell.
It must be working, because the people who get close enough always tell me I smell good. One of my (female, heterosexual) friends has a habit of picking up any shirt I’ve recently discarded and smelling it. It’s funny, because we use a lot of the same products, but she always says “It just smells better on you.”
Which brings me to another point… if you must wear fragrance, pay attention to how it smells on you, which is completely different than how it smells in the bottle. I like citrusy smells, but they’re rank on me. On the rare occasions I do wear perfume, it’s something spicy, because that’s what works best on me. A friend of mine wears a scent that I can’t stand in the bottle, but *he * smells like heaven. Body chemistry is paramount. Know what works for you!
It’s always worse on the elevator. At my school, 50% of my elevator rides I am bombarded by the smell of orangapplapeachbean alcohol extreme beauty surprise.
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