The author of French Women Don’t Get Fat on business sense and sensibility.
Guiliano's new book is aimed at women just starting out in their careers, but even the most experienced workers will learn a thing or two from her savvy collection of life lessons, stories and helpful hints. Here, an excerpt from Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire.Artificial "Sweeteners"
The scent of a woman—a phrase borrowed from the title of an Academy Award-winning film—is the signifier of a unique identity. Our scents and smells set us apart from all others. “I love your smell” certainly has been uttered romantically countless times in many languages through the centuries.
In our world, reawakened to aromatherapy, the power of some scents to calm or excite is being championed. The power of our own natural scents and odors, transpiring to various degrees through our singular bodies and pores, has long had the power of sexual attraction or repulsion. Today, a host of synthetic products, from hair products to skin creams and soaps, give us scent identities, often unwittingly. What messages is your scent sending about you? It is part of your packaging.
We can control our aroma and use it as part of our brand identity, of course, especially through the soap we use and the perfume we wear. Perfume has existed for at least four thousand years that we know of, and has been popular among aristocrats since the Renaissance and with the rest of us starting in the eighteenth century. We no longer have to put perfumed handkerchiefs to our noses as we pass through foul-smelling streets, and in our twenty-first-century developed world, now that weekly baths are a forgotten ritual of our ancestors, we generally don’t need more scent to disguise body odors; perfume is a discretionary accessory, to be managed to our advantage and protected from becoming a disadvantage.
I am not a fan of strong perfumes. In business, the scent of a strong perfume can mean disaster at a job interview or a dinner party with fine wine and foods. (You’ll certainly be noticed and distinguished from others.) All you really need is a light, fresh scent for the warm months and perhaps a spicy or musky one for the cold months. I am faithful to one scent.
The perfume industry is huge and unbelievably competitive, as anyone who has walked the main floor of a department store and been assaulted by smells, mists, and hawkers knows. It is in a bit of a decline, though, as price is a barrier for many and promotion is exceedingly expensive. Quality costs, too. The finest and most consistent blends are made from extracts and essential oils of costly natural ingredients. The industry plays more and more with synthetic engineered scents, and many new perfumes are front-loaded with bursting, compelling sweet flavors that lead to a quick sale but wear off relatively rapidly, revealing more neutral and thin composition (and perhaps to a bottle unused on a shelf at home). A nod to price is the availability of a brand’s eau de parfum or eau de toilette, diluted and shorter-lived concentrations of aromatic compounds but still the real thing. And here’s another money-saving secret: Buy the smallest bottle. Perfume, like wine, oxidizes, especially in a bottle half full (or less). And if you’re using perfume sparingly, the bottle will oxidize and lose its magic before you can ever reach the bottom.
My mother’s perfume is my perfume, Chanel No. 5, the celebrated jasmine- and rose-infused fragrance chosen by Coco Chanel in 1921. Chanel said, “A woman should wear fragrance whenever she expects to be kissed.” My mother’s gift of my first bottle of perfume was an important rite of passage to womanhood. But as far as quotes go, I prefer Marilyn Monroe’s endorsement of my perfume. When asked what she wore in bed, she purred, “Two drops of Chanel No. 5.” How’s that for exclamation points attached to a signature? For me, one drop of exclamation point works just fine, thank you.