My Partner Asked Me To Wear Perfume For Him

The more I make perfume, the less of it I seem to habitually wear.

Firstly, because it's a professional prerequisite to keep scent free on days that I'm working on formulas in the lab. 

Secondly, I have become more and more interested in the smells around me and the smells that living on earth generates. The less fragrance I apply to myself, the more I keep the airways clear to receive the scent signals that surround me; opening myself to inspiration from the infusion between nature and human life.

Each bit of geography, and each moment in time presents perfumes of their own, and if we move with awareness through our senses we can experience ourselves as fleshy filters. Our senses, genetic make-up and emotional memories weave the cellular filter that determines our own individual scent experiences. While we can be told what a lemon smells like, it is the act of smelling it ourselves that brings us closer to the true essence of a lemon. 

All this to say that I have gotten so used to wearing scent only on the rare occasion, for a function or when I remember over a weekend (often as a way to reconnect with previous perfumes I've worked on), that I haven't really been thinking enough about how people around me experience the way I smell. Enter my lover, who immediately notices the Shakespeare in Love I'm (unusually) wearing this week, and says, you should wear this more often, why don't you wear more perfume for me?

Subsequently I'm thinking about what made me want to put perfume on in those days when I was a customer and not a producer. Have the reasons I wear perfume changed?

I used to think about scent in more of a self-centred way - not wickedly selfishly so - just different from the more universal way my mind is now continually re-imagining the scent experience and the possible ways in which specific blends might filter through each individual's vessel. I always suggest to customers that they allow some time to form a relationship with a fragrance, before making a solid decision about how it might compliment the ways they move through each day.

Perfume is everything but solid. Natural perfume in particular is alive, volatile and responsive to skin chemistry. It can take time to fully appreciate the ethereal nature of perfume, and the mystery within its ability to shift consciousness. It seems to me that it's around about the same time we begin to more deeply consider our sense of smell, the feelings we have around it and the choices we make because of it, that we become ready to invite in the world of natural perfume. 

These days my relationship with the perfume I wear is between the perfume and I. When my partner smells perfume on me, I think it makes him feel like he's being let in on a secret of mine. It's intimate.

There is something about wearing perfume that stays close to the skin rather than diffusing all over the room, that feels like an extension from the unseen depths of the source of that pulse just below it. Lately I've been applying perfume a bit more between lab days, for an extra dimension of intimacy between myself and my lover. 

How do other people prompt you to consider the way you wear perfume, if at all?