Once perfume leaves the bottle, it isn’t experienced in a vacuum. When you apply perfume to skin, it mingles with your body chemistry, then radiates into the environment to compete — or harmonize — with the aromas around you. Coffee, car exhaust, thunderstorms, and the brisket you had for lunch all play against your perfume. For some people, cigarette smoke is the biggest competitor to their perfume. For some perfumes, it actually seems to work.
I’m not a smoker. I smoked one cigarette years ago and threw up, and that was the end of that. Still certain fragrances seem to beg for a sheath of cigarette smoke. Supposedly, Ernest Daltroff created Caron Tabac Blond to mask the cigarette smoke lingering on women brazen enough to be smoking just post-World War I. Molinard Habanita was even originally used to scent actual cigarettes. To me, though, perfumes that smell like tobacco don’t necessarily blend with the ozone and nicotine of a burning cigarette…
