There are the classic French fragrances, like Chanel No. 5 or Guerlain’s Mitsouko — stately, proud, full of the poise of earthy spices, oily flowers and rare musks. They’re fragrance institutions and stand tall like temples housing blood-stained altars to mythic goddesses. Worshippers prostrate themselves daily, and there will never be a lack of new converts to the religion. They are power, they are glory, they are the book of Genesis and everything else came after.
Then there are American fragrances, like Tommy Hilfiger’s Tommy Girl and Estee Lauder’s Pure White Linen — fresh, clean and balanced. Sexy, but not overly so. More toned and pretty than worldly and sophisticated. They jog past you with a white smile and a sunny wave, trailing ambition and the optimism of youth in their light-floral, powdery wakes. They build their beach houses, mow their lawns, put everything in trusts for the next generation.
And then along comes a fragrance like Funny! by Moschino. Italian. Old world with a new attitude. Old house with a new perfume. She chooses to sparkle rather than demurely glow, to view coffee and cigarettes as lunch, to drink one too many glasses of wine and ask for dessert in the middle of the soup course. And though she knows the tonal loneliness of ancient cypress trees bending in the wind and the dark shade of dusty hillside vineyards ripening under the Tuscan sun, she moves through the day as if spiritually weightless, doing a zig and a zag like she’s a beautiful girl on the back of a motorscooter, her arms flung around the most impossibly gorgeous boy, her hair streaming in the wind.
If she says “I love you” then she says it on impulse, and there’s no expectation of anything in return — just the radiant quality of sudden laughter at the table, shared childhood secrets, the vain protest as she pulls you to your feet to dance with her between the tables.
“Let’s run away,” she whispers in your ear, but you know she doesn’t mean it and the next moment she’s pulling away and rushing off to tell your fiancée the most hilarious story of how you crashed your first car into the local police station on your sixteenth birthday while drunk on your father’s homemade sambuca.
But still, you’re not sure you would have said no. How could you?
