In Angela’s recent article on Becoming a perfumista, she identified four stages along the road from newbie status to curating a personal collection of 300+ perfumes: strong interest, beginning perfume mania, full-blown perfume mania and connoisseurship. I’d like to add a fifth: rampant cynicism. This comes, I think, of already owning enough perfume to scent a small town for the foreseeable future, and then not only looking for more fragrances that you might conceivably love and want to own, but also trying (in vain) to keep track of all the new perfume releases and to smell as many of them as you can possibly manage.

You can tell you’ve reached stage five when almost everything you read about a new fragrance makes you either laugh out loud or roll your eyes, depending on your mood. I must have been “in a mood” the day I first read about the new Gucci by Gucci, because I remember rolling my eyes. Gucci’s Creative Director Frida Giannini was said to have “unleashed her affinity for masculine notes” — yeah, right. I’ve heard that nonsense before. And “modern chypre” gets an eye roll from me no matter what mood I’m in. The commercial didn’t help — I’m a David Lynch fan, but his spot for Gucci by Gucci struck me as silly…

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