Thursday, January 29, 2004
Come on, Get Sassy!
Scents have always played a sickeningly metaphorical role in my life. In my early teens, around the time that I began toting around mini-atomizers of Evian™ springwater facial mist and swabbing my skin with Origins™ cucumber toner, it only made sense that I would also begin spritzing my pulse-points with something called "Chloe™", if only because it was so obvious that I wanted to become someone named Chloe. These were my early, boyless empowerment days. Clearly people named Chloe are boyless and empowered.
Later on when I surrendered to insecurity, started hanging out with a different, more fitting crowd, and fell into the boyfriend trap, unlike other girls who doused themselves in Eternity™ and Obsession™, I headed straight for Estee Lauder's Beautiful™. This was around the same time that I routinely got up at 5:00am most mornings to work out for an hour before school. Clearly I felt I was lacking in the beauty department and needed to do everything in my power to cover it up. Hell, what your pheromones don't know won't hurt you.
At some point senior year I began sporting Chloe™ Narcisse. I'd returned to my geekily independent quasi-sophisticated roots in the form of taking three foreign languages, a slew of AP classes, actively participating in several extra-curricular activities, writing furious letters to the editor on a regular basis, and having no break for lunch. The scent itself was addictively sweet with vivid floral accompaniment, and a slight yet unprovable trace of whatever the ingredient is that goes into the Calvin Kleins & the Ralph Laurens and sends boys straight to the bathroom with the Victoria's Secret catalogue. But much more subtly and blamelessly, as opposed to something as pathetically forward as Drakkar Noir™. Clearly I was the regular old empowered Chloe again, but with a mysterious little advantage otherwise known as "game": Narcisse.
Narcisse became my unspoken theme thereafter, at least in terms of the boy I was chasing at the time. A couple years later, when finally I attempted to get over him, I went out and obtained a big bottle of Clinique™ Happy, thinking, just as the television commercial programmed me to, 'Hallelujah, come on, get happy! Forget your troubles, come on, get happy!' I would tell you it worked, but you'd never believe me. It did, though. I mean, I certainly can't give myself the credit. No, it was all the perfume's doing.
This past summer I found myself right back at square one in the Happy department. It was going to take more than effective advertising to pull me out of this one. And then somehow I found myself strolling around in the Hamptons with a totally oblivious boy who made me lose myself in a sunshiny meadow of dragonflies and four-leaf clovers, and in one of the daydreams of summercamp and tree-climbing and swimming and fishing, I remember thinking, Grass. Fresh Mown Grass. Mmm. La la la... And when I came to, I headed straight for Demeter™ Grass.
Now that I'm back from La La Land, I've intermittently, desperately gone back to Happy, as I've a huge stash of it sitting idly on my shelf going to waste, and I thought I should try once again to reap the benefits of its magical powers. Needless to say, I've become immune to its influence, and the other day on a whim I found myself waltzing into L'Occitane just to sample the Verbena.
L'Occitane's Verbena, in case you don't already know, openly mimics the scent of the Sassafras leaf. And in case you aren't yet biblically familiar with your Up-State New York Field Guide, the Sassafras tree, rarely growing more than a few feet high and endangered in many geographic areas, bears leaves that can take three different shapes. I hadn't gotten a whiff of Sassafras since I was but a wee lass squatting down alongside my cousins to examine (and promptly destroy) one at my grandparents' lake house. The Verbena bears such a resemblance to Sassafras that for some time I believed "verbena" was just a glamourous word invented to describe an upscale parfum containing Sassafras, instead of being an actual plant of its own.
But instead of just sampling this time, upon reviewing the latent metaphorical value of somehow tying myself to a tree that is not only endangered and notoriously stunted but whose leaves exist unpredictably in three different varying forms depending on its mood, I decided to splurge for the $38 eau de toilette of Verbena. Feminism and singledom may have died out more rapidly and quietly than the Sassafras, but that doesn't mean my boyless empowerment is gonna go out without a bang, without a final blow to the pheromones of every Drakkar Noir-sporting Married within a 2-block radius.
Hallelujah, come on, get sassy! Re-christen me Chloe Verbene.
Later on when I surrendered to insecurity, started hanging out with a different, more fitting crowd, and fell into the boyfriend trap, unlike other girls who doused themselves in Eternity™ and Obsession™, I headed straight for Estee Lauder's Beautiful™. This was around the same time that I routinely got up at 5:00am most mornings to work out for an hour before school. Clearly I felt I was lacking in the beauty department and needed to do everything in my power to cover it up. Hell, what your pheromones don't know won't hurt you.
At some point senior year I began sporting Chloe™ Narcisse. I'd returned to my geekily independent quasi-sophisticated roots in the form of taking three foreign languages, a slew of AP classes, actively participating in several extra-curricular activities, writing furious letters to the editor on a regular basis, and having no break for lunch. The scent itself was addictively sweet with vivid floral accompaniment, and a slight yet unprovable trace of whatever the ingredient is that goes into the Calvin Kleins & the Ralph Laurens and sends boys straight to the bathroom with the Victoria's Secret catalogue. But much more subtly and blamelessly, as opposed to something as pathetically forward as Drakkar Noir™. Clearly I was the regular old empowered Chloe again, but with a mysterious little advantage otherwise known as "game": Narcisse.
Narcisse became my unspoken theme thereafter, at least in terms of the boy I was chasing at the time. A couple years later, when finally I attempted to get over him, I went out and obtained a big bottle of Clinique™ Happy, thinking, just as the television commercial programmed me to, 'Hallelujah, come on, get happy! Forget your troubles, come on, get happy!' I would tell you it worked, but you'd never believe me. It did, though. I mean, I certainly can't give myself the credit. No, it was all the perfume's doing.
This past summer I found myself right back at square one in the Happy department. It was going to take more than effective advertising to pull me out of this one. And then somehow I found myself strolling around in the Hamptons with a totally oblivious boy who made me lose myself in a sunshiny meadow of dragonflies and four-leaf clovers, and in one of the daydreams of summercamp and tree-climbing and swimming and fishing, I remember thinking, Grass. Fresh Mown Grass. Mmm. La la la... And when I came to, I headed straight for Demeter™ Grass.
Now that I'm back from La La Land, I've intermittently, desperately gone back to Happy, as I've a huge stash of it sitting idly on my shelf going to waste, and I thought I should try once again to reap the benefits of its magical powers. Needless to say, I've become immune to its influence, and the other day on a whim I found myself waltzing into L'Occitane just to sample the Verbena.
L'Occitane's Verbena, in case you don't already know, openly mimics the scent of the Sassafras leaf. And in case you aren't yet biblically familiar with your Up-State New York Field Guide, the Sassafras tree, rarely growing more than a few feet high and endangered in many geographic areas, bears leaves that can take three different shapes. I hadn't gotten a whiff of Sassafras since I was but a wee lass squatting down alongside my cousins to examine (and promptly destroy) one at my grandparents' lake house. The Verbena bears such a resemblance to Sassafras that for some time I believed "verbena" was just a glamourous word invented to describe an upscale parfum containing Sassafras, instead of being an actual plant of its own.
But instead of just sampling this time, upon reviewing the latent metaphorical value of somehow tying myself to a tree that is not only endangered and notoriously stunted but whose leaves exist unpredictably in three different varying forms depending on its mood, I decided to splurge for the $38 eau de toilette of Verbena. Feminism and singledom may have died out more rapidly and quietly than the Sassafras, but that doesn't mean my boyless empowerment is gonna go out without a bang, without a final blow to the pheromones of every Drakkar Noir-sporting Married within a 2-block radius.
Hallelujah, come on, get sassy! Re-christen me Chloe Verbene.
