Another way to take up more space is with perfume.
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I really love wearing perfume.
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I'm not exactly a snob about the bottle a cologne comes in, but I am impressed with a good-looking presentation. It gives you confidence when you're picking up a well-designed bottle.
People have told me that the lighter your skin, the lighter the color perfume you should use. And vice-versa. But I can't limit myself to one range. (Besides, I'm sure hormones have a lot to do with how a perfume smells on your skin — I'm sure the right hormones can make Chanel No. 5 smell very butch.)
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I switch perfumes all the time. If I've been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.
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Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they've got. I never look at anything else — I don't snoop — but I'm compulsive about seeing if there's some obscure perfume I haven't tried yet, or a good old favorite I haven't smelled in a long time. If I see something interesting, I can't stop myself from pouring it on. But then for the rest of the evening, I'm paranoid that the host or hostess will get a whiff of me and notice that I smell like somebody-they-know.
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Of the five senses, smell has the closest thing to the full power of the past. Smell really is transporting. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting are just not as powerful as smelling if you want your whole being to go back for a second to something. Usually I don't want to, but by having smells stopped up in bottles, I can be in control and can only smell the smells I want to, when I want to, to get the memories I'm in the mood to have. Just for a second. The good thing about a smell-memory is that the feeling of being transported stops the instant you stop smelling, so there are no aftereffects. It's a neat way to reminisce.
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My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn't start wearing lots of them until the early 60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn't get lost forever. I loved the way the lobby of the Paramount Theater on Broadway used to smell. I would close my eyes and breathe deep whenever I was in it. Then they tore it down. I can look all I want at a picture of that lobby, but so what? I can't ever smell it again. Sometimes I picture a botany book in the future saying something like, “The lilac is now extinct. Its fragrance is thought to have been similar to —?” and then what can they say? Maybe they'll be able to give it as a chemical formula. Maybe they already can.
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I used to be afraid I would eventually run through and use up all the good colognes and there'd be nothing left but things like “Grape” and “Musk”. But now that I've been to the profumerias of Europe and seen all the colognes and perfumes they have there, I don't worry any more.
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I get very excited when I read advertisements for perfume in the fashion magazines that were published in the 30s and 40s. I try to imagine from their names what they smelled like and I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much:
Guerlain's: “Sous le Vent”
Lucien Le Long's: “Jabot”, “Gardenia”, “Mon Image” “Opening Night”
Prince Matchabelli's: “Princess of Wales” in memory of Alexandra
Ciro's: “Surrender”, “Reflexions”
Lentheric's: “A Bientot”, “Shanghai”, “Gardenia de Tahiti”
Worth's: “Imprudence”
Marcel Rochas': “Avenue Matignon”, “Air Jeune”
D'Orsay's: “Trophee”, “Le Dandy”, “Toujours Fidele”, “Belle de Jour”
Coty's: “A Suma”, “La Fougeraie au Crepuscule” (Fernery at Twilight)
Corday's: “Tzigane”, “Possession”, “Orchidee Bleue”, “Voyage a Paris”
Chanel's: brisk “Cuir de Russie” (Russian Leather); romantic “Glamour”; melting “Jasmine”; tender “Gardenia”
Molinelle's: “Venez Voir”
Houbigant's: “Countryclub”, “Demi-Jour” (Twilight)
Bonwit Teller's: “721”
Helena Rubinstein's: “Town”, “Country”
Weil's: Eau de Cologne “Carbonique”
Kathleen Mary Quinlan's: “Rhythm”
Lengyel's (pronounced “len-jel”): “Imperiale Russe”
Chevalier Garde's: “H.R.R.”, “Fleur de Perse”, “Roi de Rome”
Saravel's: “White Christmas”
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When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill, Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the streetracks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-fountain drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum, and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicycle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner's, Brentano's, Doubleday's, Rizzoli, Marboro, Bookmasters, Barnes & Noble; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects' blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried platanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, peach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple — and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings.
Andy Warhol
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
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