By
Tanya C Hayward
09.10.2014
Dedicated to a dear friend; on turning 58 on
a blood moon / lunar eclipse and always being there for me
Wogging (1.) on the promenade this morning, I overtook a
mother and daughter team dressed similarly in their early am walk gear. As I passed them I engulfed what I
assumed was their perfume and literally, nearly, I swear; fainted. It was as if they had broken their
perfume bottles open and doused themselves with the stuff, and had a Hlathini (2.) bath. My lungs burnt, my nose
stung and my head went from clear to fog with a possible chance of
showers. For the rest of the “wog”
I put my nose to the grindstone and sniff tested each passer by. Amazing, not one woman was scent
free. Or scent normal, should I say, each one either smelt of this or that
high street scent, washing detergent, cream, you get the idea. So, it got me thinking; was
it that we were conditioned to covering up our own smell or was it that we just
do not like the way we smell?
I
recently met up with someone that I had not seen in 7 years. He was a friend, now a foe of sorts; let’s
just say we have a complicated relationship and that I own an inked 6 X 4 patch
on his right upper arm. He asked
me, during our “kuir” (3.)
at his Gogo’s (4.) converted faux
bachelor pad in Soweto with rail stained mirrors in the place of pots; “do you
still wear “Delicious” by DKNY”. I
was amazed that after all these years he remembered that part of me and what startled
me even more was that I had gotten that particular bottle of the juicy apple as
a gift, a peace offering from another man that I was seeing but who obviously
knew little of me, as my piece de résistance has and still is “Allure” by
Chanel. But every time I get a
wiff of the “D” fragrance I trip back in time to that place, that space, those moments that go staccato in my brain. That time when I was so not me, so not
the person I am today, a cover of the present me. So, do we use perfume as a shield? What is it that we, I, am trying to cover up?
Recently I tried to grow out my pits. Why? Why not? I thought, hell I have been a “feminist” for years, let me
get the badge, the approval stamp. Well, I will tell you why not, because I am
not at one with the odour that I emit.
It’s not that I stink, its more of a musky, dank, something something that I do not like and since I am an eternal pseudo greeny, as in I tick and cross what I think is beneficial for the world, the environment and of course me; I do not use “conventional” deodorants and as an ex-friend once referred to my conscious free product as "that hippy shit". So, my HS deo normally works but that is when I am clean
pitted but not when I let the jungle love sprout forth. Then, oh mama, the smell is coded. Its like going back to the beginning of
time and I just woke up under an animal skin, yawned and sniffed my pits to
make sure I survived the night. Apparently
perfume or as the latin derived word ‘per fumum’ means “through the smoke” and
it comes from when the cave wo / man
discovered fire and thus dedicated the smoke to the gods of the time. Some researches say it’s the fact that the priests of
Ancient Egypt were the only people that were allowed to manufacture perfume as they were the closest to the gods and perfume and embalming was used in celebratory and religious rituals for the rich and famous. Maybe its origin is in Catholicism and the use of incense and perfume during
rites et al. In 1370, Queen
Elizabeth of Hungary, having adopted the practice of using perfume off Arabs
was such a prolific user of it, either perfume or the advent of the new
chemical processing of mixing ethanol to oils that we now call l’eau de
toilette
(toilet water), that it was renamed “Hungarian Water”. It was said she used the manufactured fragrance
to heal, ward off disease and find herself a husband at the age of 70! Whatever
she was using, I got to get me some of
that.
But what is it that I have
against the allure of “me”? It can’t
be the impending dinosaurs or the bubonic plague or the promise of making a
good woman out of me. Then what is
it? It’s simple really, it’s just
not familiar to me, as in, it’s foreign, my smell that is. Since a young age I was told to clean
myself with this shampoo; that cream, that talc. And they all come with manufactured smell so over time I lost the true
smell of me. And it is that that I
am most scared of, now a woman, to have to discover my true smell. Truly. I have for a number of years gone
through abstinence of scent. It
was at first because of my pregnancy and then the birth of my child, so that the
baby could bond with me, myself and I and not a scent that was made in a lab in
a distant land. The next reason I
boycotted wearing scent was due to economic reasons, baby and fledgling
businesses really do bust the bank and finally it was not to smell like every
other person I would bump into at the mall. But each time I leave the house without putting perfume on,
I feel as though I have left something behind. Like my veneer of confidence has dissipated.
I have been pondering
the issue of natural odour to the senses for years. One thing I do know is that our smell is directly related to
our inner workings, more specifically our hormones such as pheromones that attract and keep
our partner / s but it is perfume that secretly harbours secret components
which have been proven to cause havoc on our bodies; “chemicals are potential hormone dis-
ruptors based on published laboratory or epidemiology studies, including
diethyl phthalate, a chemical found in 97 percent of Americans (Silva 2004)……
and Tonalide, a synthetic musk that may interfere with estro- gen and androgens
(male hormones) (Schreurs 2005)” (Ref;
Page 14. http://safecosmetics.org/downloads/NotSoSexy_report_May2010.pdf). In the words of the
great thinker and author Greer; “Women have somehow been separated from their libido,
from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious
about it”. Are
we being tricked by big business to alter our sexual eau d’attraction? Are we making ill choices based on our
hypothalamus being synthetically penetrated? To think that perfume was popularised by the French to mask
body odour and their lack of hygiene and that the licentious sex workers of the
age used perfume in their “trade” to cover up the frequency of their “dates”. So now the truth is exposed, some feel
that they are “undressed” without manufactured smells, those beavers balls in a
bottle; yes castoreum is one of the key notes of the great perfumeries houses such
as Guerlain, Lancôme, Chanel, Givenchy, and many
others and comes from the North American beaver sac. Amazing that these houses use key notes that imitate the
smell of male genitalia. Funny
that.
In this modern world that we
live in, we the women now drench ourselves in artificial, male derivative essence
that contain hidden chemicals that play with our endocrine system and can mess
with our hormones and we do this why? To “fit in” or be fashionable or what? I think it is partly pragmatic as in "we don't want to smell" but more specifically that we wan to fit in. But I ask you now, to fit in to what? Perhaps it is to squeeze into that mould
of fragrance uniformity and to attract and be attractive by tricking the
natural order. Perhaps not.
So ladies of the
promenade on the Dolphin Coast of South Africa, before you haze yourself with expensive
sac juice in the morning, please read the label and have consideration
for your co-exercisee, after all, we
all share the same air and as I reserve the right to
breathe, I too want to gulp the fresh, sea air and most definitely do not want to be all
up in your “eau de Oh No”. Yours
sincerely. Namaste.
References;
11. Wogging; the sport of
more walking than running with a more jiggling of bits
22.
Hlathini; (Zulu) for bush
33.
Kuir; (Afrikaans) for visit
44.
Gogo; (Zulu) for grandmother
Links and further reading;
