#Carpet smeller

[keithjeffreys]

[donnerpartyofone]

this week’s special smell, courtesy juliewinters. it’s a little abrasive in the bottle, but it goes on with a nice combination of something dark and smokey, and something mellow and vanilla-y. it dries down to something like marshmallow. i don’t know if it’s what i expected but it is fairly close, poetically, to what i think of mahogany, specifically the mahogany doors from my childhood home. there’s a really trashy book with a hilariously bad film adaptation called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, about a psychopath who is an extremely good smeller. he makes a name for himself by being able to transcribe into perfume all sorts of things you’d never imagine, like cold glass, or a brass doorknob (and eventually virgins, but whatever). when i read the book i felt like i really understood the smells in an intimate way, like they were kind of what i had always thought about these random items without exactly expressing it to myself. recently i suddenly realized that as a little kid, i had an incredibly powerful sense of how things smell, how the world is as much categorized by its scents as it is by its textures and appearances. i felt incredibly sensitive to the fact that people smelled different depending on which decade of life they were in. i knew all my parents’ friends perfumes and colognes and who had a lot of coffee earlier in the day, who smoked occasionally, who had what alcohol. i knew the smells of wool and leather. i knew which little kids consumed a lot of corn syrup or synthetic foods, and the smell differential between a carpeted house and a house with linoleum and a house with wood. at some point this must have fallen away: one theory is that i simply grew accustomed to all this environmental stimulus, and another not-exclusive theory is that as i got older people were less inclined to constantly grab me or smooch me or other annoyances little kids are subjected to, so the odors were no longer so in my face. this might be, though, why i’m so drawn to perfumes with this kind of trompe l’oeil quality, because they make me nostalgic for a more animal time of life when i could smell the whole world.