Chick Wit
by Francesca Serritella
My passion for perfume started long before it became the inspiration for my new novel FULL BLOOM, out August 5th and available for preorder now! Consider this Classic Column “Sniff Test” a certificate of authenticity for my fragrance obsession. Maybe some of you can relate…or I hope it makes you laugh!
Every woman has one department at the shopping mall that calls to them, nay, sings to them, like a choir of angels, radiating a warm, golden light from the top of the escalator.
For me, it’s fragrance.
I’m hypnotized by those glittering little bottles on glass countertops, each one with a secret inside, winking at me from across the room.
I’ve always loved perfume, ever since I was a little girl, when the crystal bottles on my mother’s dresser seemed like magical potions.
And whenever I smelled them on her, I knew she was going somewhere glamorous, mysterious, and as-yet-off-limits to me.
Douleur exquise!
Now that I am grown up, perfumes are the closest thing I have to fairy godmothers. Scents have the power to turn me, a regular girl in dog-hair-covered yoga pants, into whatever sort of woman I want to be.
Bibbity-bobbity-spritz!
I’ve accumulated a lovely perfume collection of my own, but there’s always more to be explored. And the best thing about the fragrance department can be summed up in one word:
Testers.
Makeup departments have testers, but often you twist up the lipstick to find its head all deformed and tacky, maybe a stray piece of lint stuck to it, and you have to ask yourself:
“Is this going to give me herpes?”
I need more elegance than that. With perfume, you spritz the fancy cardstock, give it limp-wristed shake, like it’s a Polaroid picture you already know you look great in, and voila! A new scent to delight or disgust you.
In fashion, if you try on a pair of jeans that look bad, you blame yourself.
In fragrance, if you try a perfume that stinks, you move on.
And boy do I move. I require a very patient salesperson, because if I get in my head that I want a jasmine scent, I will need to smell every perfume with a jasmine note in creation before I can decide.
Only the best contenders get valuable real estate on my skin. I tell myself I will pick the top two and put one on each wrist. But then I discover another great scent, so I have to find a new spot, maybe my left inner-elbow. And before I know it, I need a map of my body labeled like a butcher’s chart to remember what I put where.
I know I’ve walked out of the fragrance department looking like I’m smelling my armpit, but really I’m revisiting the perfume I tested on my right shoulder cap.
But I can’t hang out in a fragrance department all day, can I?
I asked and they said no.
So I had to find a new outlet for my insatiable curiosity. And where does one go for insatiable curiosity?
The Internet.
That’s where I discovered Fragrantica.com, a website for maniacs.
It’s a self-described “perfume encyclopedia” of mindboggling dimension. It details 40,000 perfumes with over 600,000 reviews written by nearly half a million registered users from around the world.
In addition to user reviews, it also has industry news, blog posts, reference material, discussion forums, and something called “fragrant horoscopes.”
The webpage itself is cluttered, the interface looks like it hasn’t been updated in years, and the discussion forum still uses that AOL chat room font.
And I love it. I can kill hours on that site.
If I type “Fra-” into my web browser, it immediately suggests Fragrantica.
Mind you, my own name and website URL begins “Fra-” but my browser knows it’s a distant second.
Fragrantica has eclipsed Francesca.
Of course I registered and made a profile on it. I’m FrancescaInFiore, “Francesca in Bloom” in Italian.
I know, it’s so dorky, but it’s hardly the worst. Scanning the usernames, there are a lot of puns, like “Neckromancer,” and a few questionable choices like, “Smelly Finger.”
I had to make a profile so I could leave my own reviews and fill out my virtual fragrance wardrobe. That way other users can see what I have and what I like. We can make recommendations to each other. Some users even arrange perfume swaps.
But I’m not ready to meet these people in real life.
Primarily, I use it to scout out new scents at home. I can search by fragrance note, or brand, or parfumier, or any category you can imagine. When I find a perfume I’m curious about, I can read its official Fragrantica profile, see the rating it gets from users about what season they wear it in, what time of day, longevity, etc, and, finally, I pore over all the reviews of what it’s like.
If it sounds good enough to try in person, I click the “for test” button and it’s instantly added to my personal “for test” list in my profile page—very handy the next time I go to the fragrance department.
And so we’ve come full circle.
Get the coffee bean sniff-palate cleanser, because I’m going to be here for a while.
Copyright © Francesca Serritella