Christopher Stocks

Perfume

Solitary pleasures

One of the things that gives me deepest delight is reeking of perfume. Bottles of the stuff strew my house, and I could easily wear a different fragrance for every day of the week of the year. Perfume is like clothing, dressing up or dressing down, with different outfits for evening or day, summer, winter, happy, sexy, melancholic, stylish, silly, funny, sad.

In the city I could happily wear one perfume in the morning and another one at night, but down here in deepest Dorset on my almost-island I can go all week without spraying on a single scent.

It’s not that I love perfume any less, but rather that, when you come to think of it, perfume is at its heart a social pleasure, best shared with other people, like food and wine. Smelling perfume on one’s own is a bit like eating a gourmet meal or drinking a bottle of vintage wine alone – still a pleasure, certainly, but one diminished by the lack of anyone to share it with.

Even worse, in perfume’s case, its pleasure is diminished yet further by the fact that, after a short while, your nose becomes so accustomed to the scent you’re wearing that it’s often hard to smell it on yourself at all, though other people, hours later, will often catch a drift of it and ask you what it is.

Solitary pleasures have their place, of course, and sometimes when I go to bed at night I spray a favourite perfume on to savour as I drift to sleep, but all the same it’s slightly sad to think that such a pleasurable pursuit has, like fashion, no real place outside the crowded social setting of a city or a town.