The Scent Of A Woman

What is the scent of a woman in another country from you?

Have you ever imagined this? Have you ever thought to explore? If you do not travel there, another may go, or there is always the global marketplace of the internet to draw some curiosity into your normal world.

Like a costume from another culture, scent lets you slip into the psyche of women from another culture, the existential heartbeat. It lets you experience them, and yourself in a new way. I remember recently reading that according to market research, Latin women preferred scents that were floral but that also had fruit notes.

A friend of mine was going on a business trip to Madrid. I asked him to bring me back a toiletry that was native to Spain. It could be anything, but something that I could not find in America.

He succeeded brilliantly. Not only did he gift me with a Spanish fan from a place that sold Mantillas, he braved Madrid airport security to bring me back a scent that Spanish women treasured, which would give me a sense of what it would be like to 'slip into their skin' so to speak; to feel as one of them in the private moments of my boudoir. He brought me the designer Adolfo Dominguez's scent 'Aqua Fresca de Roses', a fragrance which recalls fruit and flowers floating in water, their diffuse infusion, crystalline, refreshing, sparkling, and very feminine.

At night, I wash in the gellee, smooth on the scented skin milk and finish with a veil of scent. I look at myself in the mirror and feel 'myself', but as a Spanish lady. It is an interesting scentual experience, different from my usual choices. I revel in heavy scents at this time, Tunisian amber oil, Samsara with it's heavy lidded Sandalwood and euphoric Jasmine notes, Nuit de Noel by Caron. There are others. Some I may abstain from for a year or two or more. I can be loyal to one man, but never to one perfume, though I don't stray for too long if I love it.

For now, I am flirting with this surprising Spanish scent and experiencing life as a 'Maja', a beautiful Spanish lady from Madrid, sparkling, florid, and ripe with sensuality, but with a crystalline modern quality, an effervescence that my husband has commented on and which is not incompatible with the black alpaca wool I am usually swathed in when I brace against the winter winds. It is like an ice-shard of rose water in which ripe mangoes had been floating. In its own way, it is devastating.