Last week at the invitation of my perfume-loving friend, Diana, I assisted at a presentation on perfume and gender for the Gender Studies Symposium at Lewis & Clark College. The presentation was in a long, stuffy room which soon filled with students. Most wore jeans and hoodies. One sat cross-legged and knitted.

Once the room quieted, I asked how many of the students wore fragrance. A few hands crept up. “What do you wear?” I asked. The students hesitated, but one of the men volunteered he liked the Burberry scents. Another man admitted to Axe. A professor said she’d been wearing China Rain perfume oil for years.

A little later in the presentation, we handed out cards spritzed with fragrance for the students to guess, without knowing the name of the scent, whether the fragrance was marketed to men or women…

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Last week while killing time in a used bookstore, I leafed through French Chic: How to Dress Like a French Woman by Susan Sommers. It had a short section with some predictable advice on wearing fragrance (wear perfume for a few hours before you decide if you like it; fragrance comes in different formulations, etc.), but I did find an interesting quote by Sonia Rykiel. She said a fragrance wardrobe should start with a base scent, just like a clothing wardrobe has basics, then build on it.

This advice appeals to the part of me that loves patterns and relationships. Five years ago or so I attempted to chart my perfume wardrobe to find similarities between the fragrances I own. I grouped fragrances by their families and by categories I made up — “reading” perfumes, “going out” perfumes — and drew lines between them, seeking some kind of common ground. (All this when I could have been volunteering at the food bank! Or at least cleaning the basement.) I ended up with a large sheet of drawing paper covered with perfume names splattered like constellations, without even a Big Dipper to give it form…

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