Days of Shades

I've once again been hit by a perverse desire to explore Villainess and Bpal. I almost never wear scent, I can't stand people over-applying perfumes, and I choose my shampoo specifically to avoid lingering aroma. But I have this fascination with online perfume makers. What gives?

I think I've figured it out.

I'm really, truly terrible at 'visualizing'* smells and flavours. I cannot taste the cherry notes in my glass of red wine**. This thrown into relief when I'm drinking coffee with Erik, who is very good at it:

"Smell it -- notice the green bell pepper over the leather? It's from unwashed African beans -- if you pay attention to the aftertaste, you can tell that three, no, four undernourished children picked the fruit, and, hmmm...I think a snail slimed over it before it was bagged and shipped."

It's not that I can't distinguish differences between two smells, but I'm very bad at analyzing them, which translates to being bad at imagining them from a textual description. When I was reading Cheesemonger I was constantly craving cheese -- partly because cheese is delicious, but also because I wanted to be able to tell what he was talking about (when he wasn't talking about the punk rock ethos or farm politics. Everyone needs to read that book).

Since Cheesemonger, Erik and I have attempted to educate my tastebuds. When we splurge for some fancy cheese, I try to describe their characteristics in writing. Slowly, very slowly, I'm getting better at it. In that context, a desire for a box of imps ears and fancy soaps makes a kind of sense:

I want to educate my nose.



*er, smell-erizing? Using my mind's nose?

**I can taste that it's more curved at the top and has fewer sharp bits, but this just makes the oenophiles look at me funny.

The other day I shocked Erik by declaring that a bag of unground Yemen beans as 'reeking of cigarettes' -- he was very proud of me. I believe he meant to say "That's the first time you've described a smell in terms of another smell" but what he said was "You used WORDS!"