Spray Perfume Quotes

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I've fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends -- more now than ever before. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.

The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes. So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase? So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

December 27, Noon. America, I might as well tell you this since your maids will tell you anyway. I've been thinking of the little things you do. Sometimes you hum when you walk around the palace. Sometimes when I come up to your room, I hear the melodies you've saved up in your heart spill out the doorway. The palace seems empty without them. I also miss your smell. I miss your perfume drifting off your hair when you turn to laugh at me or your scent radiating on your skin when we walk through the garden. It's intoxicating. So I went to your room to spray your perfume on my handkerchief, another silly little trick to make me feel like you were here. And as I was leaving your room, Mary caught me. I'm not sure what she was looking after since you're not here; but she saw me, shrieked, and a guard came running in to see what was wrong. He had his staff gripped, and his eyes flashed threateningly. I was nearly attacked. All because I missed your smell.

I’m not sure what it was or where she sprayed it, but her scent will be the end of the life I loved. And I will find comfort in the simpleness of sitting with her on a Saturday afternoon with nothing else to do.

The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales’ stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel Number 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.

If rape culture had a downtown, it would smell like Axe body spray and that perfume they put on tampons to make your vagina smell like laundry detergent.

Chemical warfare is the only way to describe what happens when cheap perfume, body splash, body spray, underarm deodorant, curl activator, hair spray, and pissy Pampers collide.

A Ford motorcar is a magical thing in the night with the spraying lamps against the pitch road and the smell of metal and perfume under the clothy roof.

And once out, Eleanor thought silently, you can’t put it back any more than returning a mist of perfume to a bottle once it has been sprayed.

Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much, the mother oysters and mussels must be treated gently—as the Scottish pearl-fishers, too, had learned to their regret. These creatures are a barometer of how we are treating our planet. Sometimes in our greed to make them produce pretty things for our pleasure we forget that they deserve our respect.

For instance, we were always making mistakes with the unfamiliar products around us, and one time my mother squirted my perfume into her mouth, thinking it was breath spray. When she stopped gagging and cursing me, she burst out laughing. Neither of us could stop until tears ran down our faces.

I adore my mother, but I fear for her. She seems helpless, caught in the vortex of my father's dark moods and unpredictable behavior. I try never to displease her. I love the scent of Juicy Fruit gum on her breath and the hint of Joy perfume on her neck, the crisp crinkle of her hair stiff with aerosol spray and the chipped pink polish on her nails.

She looked down at the hand and saw that it was clutching instead a handful of perfume card samplers, each one sprayed with a different scent.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

His heart slammed against his ribs, and joy flooded him, followed almost instantly by distress. Even from fifteen yards away he could see that she wore no makeup, and lines of fatigue were etched on her face. Her hair was restrained with a clip at the nape of her neck, and for the first time since he'd known her, she looked almost plain. Where was the Daisy who loved to primp and fuzz with her perfumes and powder? The Daisy who took such joy in dabbing herself with apricot scented lotion and raspberry red lipstick? Where was the daisy who used up all the hot water taking her showers and left a sticky film of hair spray on the bathroom door? Dry mouthed, he drank in the sight of her, and something broke apart inside him. This was Daisy as he'd made her. This was Daisy with her love light extinguished.

This is where we are now, endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life. I always read brutality in those messages: they offer next to nothing. There are days when I can say with great certainty that I am not strong enough to manage. And what if I can’t hang on in there? What then? These people might as well be leaning into my face, shouting, Cope! Cope! Cope! while spraying perfume into the air to make it all seem nice. The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick. And if you can’t pull that off, then you’d better disappear from view for a while. You’re dragging down the vibe.

What does a woman do as she waits for her man? She may wash her hair, put on makeup, choose the kind of outfit any woman would be eager to try on, spray on perfume, and look at herself one last time in the mirror. If she does these things, it's when she and the man she's waiting for are in love. It's different when a woman waits for a man she still loves but who has broken up with her, because the pure joy of it is missing. Loving someone is like carving words into the back of your hand. Even if the others can't see the words, they, like glowing letters, stand out in the eyes of the person who's left you. Right now, that's enough for me.

She had hit rock-bottom. She had given a blow job to a man who for all intents and purposes, was a bum. He had smelled so bad, she forced him to spray on some of the perfume she always carried in her purse. Her favorite perfume. After tonight, she was quitting. Yeah, she’d have to go back home with her two kids, grovel to her mama and work a dead-end job, but anything was better than getting down on your knees to give a guy as disgusting as Lenny a one-off.

Also, just before the shift started tonight, I had walked to the drugstore across the street [...] and used one of their perfume testers. Nothing too obvious or flowery, just a body spray with a hint of musk that said you admired your captor.

My smell stays with you? I ruined you…for what?” “Your smell keeps me going all the time. I’m in a clutch game or at practice and it’s full count? Your cloves and vanilla scent calms me down. I spray it on the front of my uniform and rub my right hand across like this.” I demonstrate by rubbing my chest and she watches me in fascination like a starstruck teenager watches a rockstar play his bass. “I went to three different stores before I found the exact scent. Expensive. French perfume. Chamade by Guerlain.” She nods looking fascinated or charmed by me at least for a few seconds. “I got it in Paris when I was there a few years ago. I love it.” “I do too. So yes, you ruined me. For anyone else.” She’s smiling but then it slowly disappears like a countdown does as it goes from ten to zero. “What are you doing to me, Elvis?” she asks, looking troubled.

We spent afternoons kicking around in the sand, picking through the seaweed for shells, making headdresses of washed-up fishing ropes and hats from Styrofoam cups. Beach rats, we were called. We stopped brushing our hair, and it hung in tangles spun by the salt air. We sprayed Sun-In across our heads and let it turn our hair orange in patches. Our skin peeled, and we didn't much care. We woke up to the feel of sand in our sheets. We covered ourselves in baby oil and iodine and let the sun bake our skin. We smelled like Love's Baby Soft perfume, like summer all year long. We were tanned, with freckles across our noses.

December 27, noon America, I might as well tell you this since your maid will tell you anyway. I’ve been thinking of the little things you do. Sometimes you hum or sing when you walk around the palace. Sometimes when I come up to your room, I hear the melodies you’ve saved up in your heart spilling out the doorway. The palace seems empty without them. I also miss your smell. I miss your perfume drifting off your hair when you turn to laugh at me or your scent radiating on your skin when we walk through the garden. It’s intoxicating. So I went to your room to spray your perfume on my handkerchief, another silly trick to make me feel like you were here. And as I was leaving your room, Mary caught me. I’m not sure what she was looking after since you’re not here; but she saw me, shrieked, and a guard came running in to see what was wrong. He had his staff gripped, and his eyes flashed threateningly. I was nearly attacked. All because I missed your smell.

As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. “Don’t you know what that junk is made of?” Ben said once. “Ground-up cocks’ combs.” But this doesn’t deter me, I’d use anything if it worked – slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip drip of time, stay more or less the way I am. But I own enough of this slop already to embalm all of the girls in my high school graduating class, who must need it by now as much as I do. I stop only long enough to allow myself to be sprayed by a girl giving away free squirts of some venomous new perfume. The femme fatale must be back, Veronica Lake slinks again. The stuff smells like grape Kool-Aid. I can’t imagine it seducing anything but a fruit fly.

Is that an orchid?" I asked, pointing to a particularly unattractive small brown plant. "Maxillaria tenuifolia," said Sonali. "One of my favorites. This little brown orchid is a species. Not as spectacular as a hybrid, but very satisfying nonetheless. Its charms are quite powerful. Come closer and smell it." I leaned over the ugly brown plant. "Coconut pie! How is that possible?" "Wonderful, isn't it? She doesn't need bright, flashy colors or spectacular sprays of flowers. Her pollinators, the moths, come out at night. She uses her coconut scent to guide and entice the little moth in much the way we use perfume to entice men in nightclubs and cafés." Sonali winked at me. "You can learn much about how an orchid is pollinated by the way it looks. White, pink, and pale-green flowers usually get pollinated at night, since those colors are easily seen under moonlight. The little moth sneaks up on the flower in the middle of the night like a lover. He lands on her, pollinates her, and then leaves. We've all had that experience, yes?" "Yes," I said, thinking of Exley. "Brightly colored orchids, on the other hand, are pollinated by butterflies and birds. Butterflies prefer red and orange. Bees love orange and yellow all the way through to ultraviolet." "Just like certain men like certain color clothing," I said. "Yes, colored petals are the clothing of flowers. The insect must find a way through those petals to get what he wants, like a man brushing his hand through the layers of a woman's skirt.

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn't make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I'm the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart - perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I'm in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn't that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn't that the simple magic phrase? So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man - the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you've made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine. And then you run into Nick Dunne on Seventh Avenue as you're buying diced cantaloupe, and pow, you are known, you are recognised, the both of you. You both find the exact same things worth remembering. (Just one olive, though). You have the same rhythm. Click. You just know each other. All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it's so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. That fast. You think: Oh, here is the rest of my life. It's finally arrived.

Christine's heart is thumping wildly. She lets herself be led (her aunt means her nothing but good) into a tiled and mirrored room full of warmth and sweetly scented with mild floral soap and sprayed perfumes; an electrical apparatus roars like a mountain storm in the adjoining room. The hairdresser, a brisk, snub-nosed Frenchwoman, is given all sorts of instructions, little of which Christine understands or cares to. A new desire has come over her to give herself up, to submit and let herself be surprised. She allows herself to be seated in the comfortable barber's chair and her aunt disappears. She leans back gently, and, eyes closed in a luxurious stupor, senses a mechanical clattering, cold steel on her neck, and the easy incomprehensible chatter of the cheerful hairdresser; she breathes in clouds of fragrance and lets aromatic balms and clever fingers run over her hair and neck. Just don't open your eyes, she thinks. If you do, it might go away. Don't question anything, just savor this Sundayish feeling of sitting back for once, of being waited on instead of waiting on other people. Just let our hands fall into your lap, let good things happen to you, let it come, savor it, this rare swoon of lying back and being ministered to, this strange voluptuous feeling you haven't experienced in years, in decades. Eyes closed, feeling the fragrant warmth enveloping her, she remembers the last time: she's a child, in bed, she had a fever for days, but now it's over and her mother brings some sweet white almond milk, her father and her brother are sitting by her bed, everyone's taking care of her, everyone's doing things for her, they're all gentle and nice. In the next room the canary is singing mischievously, the bed is soft and warm, there's no need to go to school, everything's being done for her, there are toys on the bed, though she's too pleasantly lulled to play with them; no, it's better to close her eyes and really feel, deep down, the idleness, the being waited on. It's been decades since she thought of this lovely languor from her childhood, but suddenly it's back: her skin, her temples bathed in warmth are doing the remembering. A few times the brisk salonist asks some question like, 'Would you like it shorter?' But she answers only, 'Whatever you think,' and deliberately avoids the mirror held up to her. Best not to disturb the wonderful irresponsibility of letting things happen to you, this detachment from doing or wanting anything. Though it would be tempting to give someone an order just once, for the first time in your life, to make some imperious demand, to call for such and such. Now fragrance from a shiny bottle streams over her hair, a razor blade tickles her gently and delicately, her head feels suddenly strangely light and the skin of her neck cool and bare. She wants to look in the mirror, but keeping her eyes closed in prolonging the numb dreamy feeling so pleasantly. Meanwhile a second young woman has slipped beside her like a sylph to do her nails while the other is waving her hair. She submits to it all without resistance, almost without surprise, and makes no protest when, after an introductory 'Vous etes un peu pale, Mademoiselle,' the busy salonist, employing all manner of pencils and crayons, reddens her lips, reinforces the arches of her eyebrows, and touches up the color of her cheeks. She's aware of it all and, in her pleasant detached stupor, unaware of it too: drugged by the humid, fragrance-laden air, she hardly knows if all this happening to her or to some other, brand-new self. It's all dreamily disjointed, not quite real, and she's a little afraid of suddenly falling out of the dream.

Heterosexual prefixes dissimilar and adopts a natural conception, not as gay who adapts unnatural perception, as since perfume and odour cannot be the same; indeed, I spray perfume. -

Heterosexual prefixes dissimilar and adopts a natural conception, not as gay, who adapts unnatural perception, as since perfume and odor cannot be the same; indeed, I spray perfume.

I would have FedExed you one of my sweaters,” I joked. “And you could have worn it like a hug.” “Would you have sprayed it with Dior?” I laughed, happy that she remembered my brand of perfume. “Absolutely.

keep out of a wastebasket, off a counter, or from chewing furniture. Another option is a hotsauce-and-perfume mix. Test any sprays to make sure that they don’t stain.

As a child, I had not known the world anthropology or that there was a thing called Ivy League. I had not known that you could spend your days on planes, moving through the world, studying death, your whole life before this life an unanswered question...finally answered. I had seen death in Indonesia and Korea. Death in Mauritania and Mongolia. I had watched the people of Madagascar exhume the muslin-wrapped bones of their ancestors, spray them with perfume, and ask those who had already passed to the next place for their stories, prayers, blessings. I had been home a month watching my father die. Death didn't frighten me. Not now. Not anymore. But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat.

Kestrel waited outside Arin’s tent. It was a muzzy sort of night, too warm for a fire. The camp was a dark terrain. He didn’t see her clearly, just the shape of her. “I brought you something.” She held out her hand and dropped a round object into his. I knew it instantly. He ran fingers over its firm, lightly pebbled surface. “An orange.” “I found a tree not far from camp and took as many as I could carry. Most I gave away. This one, I thought we could share.” He jumped the orange from one hand to the other, marveling at it. She said, “I didn’t know whether you like them.” “I do.” “Did you tell this to me once? Did I forget?” “I never told you. Actually…” He rolled it in the well of one palm. “I love them.” He could have sworn that she smiled in the dark. “Then what are you waiting for?” He dug his thumb in and peeled it open. Its perfume sprayed the air. He halved it and gave Kestrel her share. They sat on the grass outside his tent. They’d camped in a meadow not far from the road. He touched the grass, sleek beneath his fingers. He ate. The fruit was vibrant on his tongue. It had been years. “Thank you.” He thought he saw her mouth curve, and he was washed by a breathless nervousness. He spat a seed into his palm and wondered what little kernel lay in the folds of this moment. Then he told himself to stop thinking. An orange. A rare enough pleasure. Just eat.

It was 10:45. Across the continent Susan would be putting on her makeup now, and spraying some perfume on herself and making sure her hair was perfect. I looked at my reflection in the window. My hair wasn’t perfect. Neither was I.

INGREDIENTS: 1 clean jam jar with airtight lid 2 cups rose petals, red or pink, washed, dried and shredded (be careful to use only rose petals that have not been sprayed with insecticides) 1 cup white sugar (or rock sugar) ½ teaspoon cardamom seeds, crushed (optional) DIRECTIONS: Layer the bottom of the jar with some shredded dried petals. Add a layer of sugar. Repeat the process until you’ve used up all the petals and sugar. At this point, you can add the crushed cardamom seeds if desired. Close the jar tightly with a lid. Place the jar in sunlight for 7 to 10 days. Every day, use a clean spoon to stir the contents, which will start to become moist. On the last day, stir and store the jar in the refrigerator. It should last up to a year. Enjoy on toast, ice cream, in milk or even just out of the jar! Some folks add it to paan, a popular Indian snack and breath freshener made with betel leaves and stuffed with areca nuts, lime paste, cardamom, coconut, fennel and other spices. A PERFUME PRIMER Perfume.

The Peacock & The Eagle: Cleopatra's Entry Into Tarsus by Stewart Stafford Cleopatra arrives, regal and mighty, From ocean spray as Aphrodite, Wealthy and waif, yearning for her, Dared all to defy her possessive aura. Mark Antony, struck by her sultry gaze, Lepidus, prisoner in a bureaucrat's maze, Sees power slipping from a friend’s hand, Ensnared by a siren from a scorched land. Lepidus was Caesar's trusted right hand; A granule falling through hourglass sand, Antony, headstrong military provocateur; Funeral orator from bloody crown auteur. Bargain's scorpion pincers; no longer twain: Cleopatra was Ceres, promising Rome grain, Antony was Mars' armed emissary, Business and pleasure's flood tributary. Antony: "Barge of emerald, Elysium's onyx! Beyond counsel words of sage sardonic, Gliding the Cydnus's silken seam, This Nile Helen shall be my queen." Lepidus: "Pleasure vessel of a floating whore, Yours for a sesterce on the Tiber's shore, Honour your oath, noble Roman creed, Lest passion’s shipwreck sets out to sea.” "This Venus virago on her mirage barge; Serpent prow, silver oars, rhythmic charge! What hubris to think she can equal, The bloody talons of our Roman eagle!" Antony: "Feast your eyes past peacock's bower, She speaks Rome's tongue of naked power. Mark it, that obsidian Sphinx stings - Human head, lion's body, eagle wings! "That is the form she takes to the public: I smell a perfumed alliance for the Republic! With Plebeians as her tickled cats, they hum, I crave her beauty and company. Come!" © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Heterosexual prefixes dissimilar and adopts a natural conception, not gay who adapts unnatural perception since perfume and odour cannot be the same; indeed, I spray perfume.

Heterosexual prefixes dissimilar and adopts a natural conception, not gay who adapts unnatural perception since perfume and odor cannot be the same; indeed, I spray perfume.

It had happened in a street in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey-sweet perfume. Mimosa--but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his childhood to recover from an illness. And now this silvery bell note had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel.

It’s no coincidence that the women who spray perfume all over themselves are always the ones with an orange tan too. I put it down to the fact that all the CFC gases they pump out burn up the ozone above their heads, so the sun tans them the most. Obvious, innit.

My smells of a son are gummy sweeties, Play-Doh, Pritt Stick, poster paint and wax crayons. Earthy mud on polyester football kit. The sweet antiseptic of sticking plasters. Fruity bubble gum and the minty tang of chong- as he and his friends called chewing gum. Bicycle chain oil and rubber inner tubes. The chemical overload of Lynx sprayed profusely over sweat, hair gel and toxic trainers. Fried onions and meat on the breath. Tomato ketchup. My scents for a son are: I am Juicy Couture by Juicy Couture Black by Bvlgari L'Air de Rien by Miller Harris Serge Noire by Serge Lutens Rocker Femme by Britney Spears Dirty by Lush Africa by Lynx

Again Polly remembered all the notes in this perfume from the event earlier, and enjoyed waiting for each one to register in the olfactory bulb in the front of her brain, while her imagination did its own thing. The neroli, jasmine and sandalwood transported her to a summer night in the south of France, wearing a crisp white shirt- this was a much fresher chypre than the first one. Then she remembered she'd sprayed this one on her wrist during the event earlier and lifted it to her nose to see how it developed since then. Suddenly, out of nowhere: David. Her eyes snapped open. Coal tar? "Has this got guaiac wood in it?" she asked Lucien, not caring if it interfered with his testing of Guy. Lucien smiled broadly. "Yes," he said, "but very, very deep inside, it's a base note, as you would know. Your nose is very good, Polly." Guy grasped her wrist and brought it to his nose. "It's just under the bergamot and before the honeysuckle," he said, opening his eyes.

He put one of his heavy crystal perfume bottles into her hand. A big one with an old-fashioned silk puffer spray. She looked at the label and saw it wasn't the one she'd sprayed on her wrist, but the first cap she'd smelled and hadn't liked so much. It was called the Darkest Hour. "I know you like Half Past Eight more," said Guy. "You think you're not a spicy-orientals girl, with your Celtic blood and your dry skin; I read your blog, I know about your fetish for chypre fragrances. It's the oakmoss and patchouli combo alongside the burned lemon you're responding to in Half Past Eight." Polly had to laugh. "Bang to rights," she said. "Halfway to chypre paradise...

I hear from the sofa- ‘Wear a jacket, Karly!’ My mom thinks even when I’m dressed, I’m still half-naked. So, out the door, I see sis get on the yellow bus. Waving at me like a moron out the window! And the cold feels like a b*tch slap to my face, yet it is a good way to wake up. I got into the SUV that was wrecked the night before. Thinking that this thing is like a coffin to me, yet I could say anything, or Jenny would think I have completely lost my mind. So, we go down all the same roads, not stopping at any of the red or yellow lights or signs. When Liv gets into the car she leans forward and grabs my hot- chocolate, and the smell of her perfume is strawberry, it is a body spray she has been wearing devotedly ever senses she was twelve and her hips and boobs develop like the end of sixth grade, she buys like five bottles every time we go into Sally Beauty Supply. I know that she has it on her, so I ask her for a squirt, even though I am sick of it after all these years, and even though I don’t want to smell like her, I ask for it anyway, I don’t want to smell like balls! Even though it stopped being cool in seventh grade, to where kiddy stuff like she still does- I have to close my eyes, overwhelmed, and coffin as a puff of it surrounds me, or then what I asked for. Gross, I smell like a pre-teen after gym class now, just trying to cover it up. Closing my eyes was a horrible idea. One- I get to feeling car sick. Two- I can see where Jenny is driving, and the way it feels- it must be off the road. Three- I start to daydream about Marcel, plus heartsick over Ray still, even though I was done after what he did to me, I can stop having feelings for him, he was the first that took me from behind. Oh no, he was not my first love god no, I didn’t know what love was until I saw it in Marcel's eyes, but was it real? That is what I am afraid of- trusting my heart to a boy again. I could see all the flashes of sincere light within Marcel's home, I could see him holding as no boy has ever done with me. I could almost feel the tingle of his kiss on my lips. ‘Holy freaking crap balls,’ said Jenny. I snap my eyes open as Jenny swerves to avoid hitting a cuddly black cat, walking past. That is when I start to look out the window into the side mirror, and the glossy dark trees are flocking on either side of us like outlined ghosts in the navy-blue sky. I smell something hot. I said- ‘Yeah that’s just me.’ I hear Jenny shrieking not too long after I feel relaxed, and yet once more, I feel my stomach go to the bottom of my feet and back up, as the SUV rolls to the one side, tires wailing- ‘It was a family of deer this time, trying not to get murdered. You should have seen their faces. It’s like mine every time I ride in this SUV.

False and crafty people do not match with the honest and sincere people. First, spray stinky smell and the second wave perfume.

Heterosexual prefixes dissimilar, and adopts a natural conception, not as gay, who adapts unnatural perception, as since perfume and odour cannot be the same; indeed, I spray perfume.

Nina!" Cillian leans against the door frame, halfway through brushing his teeth. "Thought I saw you jump the fence. Rhys is coming over soon." "Oh, thank you." The demon breathes in deeply, sighing out contentment. He sits up straighter. "At least someone in here is happy." Cillian shrugs defensively at my accusing glare. "Can I help it if I look forward to seeing my boyfriend? We're gonna watch Eurovision." "What did you think of their decision to have Australia back?" the demon asks. "Because I thought it was bullocks. I don't care how good they were. It's Eurovision, not Anywherevision!" "It did sort of ruin the whole 'guest event' concept when they kept letting them come back year after year." "Hello?" I wave in front of Cillian's face. "You do know he's eating your happiness, right?" "Doesn't feel like anything." The demon shifts position again with a clanking of chains. "I can't take away his happiness. It's like if you spray perfume and I smell it. Just because I'm inhaling the scent doesn't mean it leaves you." "Yeah, but smelling someone's perfume is a little different from consuming their emotions." "Says you, a person who has never consumed emotions.

Nina!" Cillian leans against the door frame, halfway through brushing his teeth. "Thought I saw you jump the fence. Rhys is coming over soon." "Oh, thank you." The demon breathes in deeply, sighing out contentment. He sits up straighter. "At least someone in here is happy." Cillian shrugs defensively at my accusing glare. "Can I help it if I look forward to seeing my boyfriend? We're gonna watch Eurovision." "What did you think of their decision to have Australia back?" the demon asks. "Because I thought it was bullocks. I don't care how good they were. It's Eurovision, not Anywherevision!" "It did sort of ruin the whole 'guest event' concept when they kept letting them come back year after year." "Hello?" I wave in front of Cillian's face. "You do know he's eating your happiness, right?" "Doesn't feel like anything." The demon shifts position again with a clanking of chains. "I can't take away his happiness. It's like if you spray perfume and I smell it. Just because I'm inhaling the scent doesn't mean it leaves you." "Yeah, but smelling someone's perfume is a little different from consuming their emotions." "Says you, a person who has never consumed emotions.

Grapefruits I can eat. They spray citrus perfume into the cold air and I can pick and pick on their generous flesh for only a hundred calories.

Valerie reached up and pulled off her earrings. “These are no longer a symbol of us!” she said, and threw the earrings into the grass behind her. Another girl joined her and started raising her own symbols in the air. She picked up a pair of pantyhose and threw them away. Another girl threw her purse about 30 feet. They’d obviously been told beforehand to bring all the symbols of girlhood because everyone seemed to have something to throw away—jewelry, acrylic nails, perfume, and makeup. Patty raised up a can of hairspray and shot it out into the air, waving it to show the stream. Just then, Mark, head of Clean Up Kidsboro, flew out of a nearby bush. He had obviously been watching them to make sure they finished the bathroom. But now, I had a feeling he thought the feminists had gone too far. “Hey! Stop that!” he yelled. Most of the girls ignored him, including Patty, who continued spraying. “Those are harmful chemicals!” he protested. She continued to ignore him. “Stop spraying!” he yelled, jumping up and snatching the can from her hand. Some of the girls finally noticed that there was a boy present, and their frenzy came to an abrupt halt. “What are you people doing?” Mark shouted. “You’re killing us! My organization is relying on you. You’re supposed to be digging a latrine, not spraying deadly chemicals in the air!” “We’re just about to dig,” Patty said. “Well, get started, then! You’ve only got 24 hours, or we lose our funding!” “How about it, girls?” Valerie shouted, trying to regain the momentum

The night was still, of a milk-warm loveliness. Moonlight sprayed silver on the shining camphor- leaves; late orange-blossom swathed the cottage in a perfume so dense that it could almost be felt. The spirit of Meerlust had never been more subtly intoxicating.

Conventional evolutionary theory assures us that all you scheming, gold-digging women reading this are evolved to trick a trusting yet boring guy into marrying you, only to then spray on a bunch of perfume and run down to the local singles club to try to get pregnant by some unshaven Neanderthal as soon as hubby falls asleep on the couch. How could you? But before male readers start feeling superior, remember that according to the same narrative, you evolved to woo and marry some innocent young beauty with empty promises of undying love, fake Rolex prominent on your wrist, get her pregnant ASAP, then start “working late” with as many secretaries as you can manage. Nothing to be proud of, mister.

He moved to the bathroom. He studied the cosmetics lined up in a neat row on a carefully folded washcloth. She always lined up her cosmetics in the same way. He reached for her perfume and inhaled the scent. Neatness and organization were quirks of hers. Someone who didn’t understand her would call her OCD, but he understood the rigors of travel and the importance of simple routines that created a sense of home and familiarity in what was an endless stream of generic hotel rooms. He sprayed a quick burst of her perfume on his wrist and held it to his nose. He would carry her scent with him for the rest of the day.

P.S. Most women spray their letters with perfume. You’re the first who has scented the paper with their pussy. Brava.