I stopped saving my good perfume for occasions that never came

I found a bottle at the back of a drawer last spring with maybe two centimetres gone from the top. I’d bought it four years earlier. I could remember the shop, I could remember deciding it was too good for a Tuesday, and I could remember the small pleasurable feeling of putting it away for something better.

The something better never arrived. What arrived was four years.

It hadn’t turned, exactly, but it wasn’t what it had been either. The top notes had gone flat and slightly sour, the way citrus does when it’s been sitting in warmth and light. The thing I’d been protecting had quietly degraded while I protected it. There’s a joke in there about my twenties that I’m choosing not to make.

The logic of saving

Every woman I know does a version of this. The good candle that stays in its box. The underwear kept for an occasion that would apparently justify it. The dress with the tags still on, waiting for a body or an event or a version of herself that qualifies.

Underneath it is an idea so ordinary we don’t notice we’re carrying it: that ordinary life is not sufficiently important to deserve the good things, and that at some point a properly significant life will begin, at which point the good things will be released.

I’d like to report that I worked this out through wisdom. I worked it out through waste.

Perfume is a poor thing to hoard, practically speaking. It’s a solution of aromatic materials in alcohol and it is not stable forever. Heat, light and air are all working against it. A bottle left half-full for years is oxidising every time you open it. Storing it on a sunny windowsill, which is where most of us keep the pretty ones because they look lovely there, is close to the worst thing you can do to it.

So the calculation I’d been making — save it, and I’ll have more of it later — was arithmetically wrong. I didn’t have more of it later. I had less, and worse.

What I do now

I wear it to do nothing.

Genuinely. I put on something expensive to answer emails. I wear it in a dressing gown at ten in the morning with wet hair and no intention of leaving the house. I wear it to the supermarket, which I find quietly hilarious and also completely reasonable, because who exactly was the audience I was saving it for?

That was the question that broke the habit. Not “do I deserve this” — I find that framing exhausting and slightly self-pitying. The useful question was: who is this for?

Because if the answer was other people, I was storing a bottle of alcohol and jasmine in a drawer against the possibility of being seen by someone who mattered enough. And that’s a fairly bleak way to organise a life. If the answer was me, then the drawer made no sense at all.

Perfume, unlike almost everything else in fashion, is worn primarily by the person wearing it. You get it all day. Everyone else gets a passing suggestion of it. It’s the most private luxury there is, which makes it the strangest possible thing to save for company.

Scent is a memory device, whether you like it or not

The link between smell and memory isn’t a poetic conceit, it’s anatomical. The olfactory system has unusually direct wiring to the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory, which is why a scent can produce a feeling before you’ve consciously identified what you’re smelling.

This has a practical consequence that nobody warns you about when you’re twenty and buying your first proper bottle: whatever you wear constantly during a significant period will be permanently welded to it.

There’s one I can’t wear anymore. Perfectly lovely, expensive, universally admired. I wore it through a bad eighteen months and now it smells like that eighteen months, and no amount of reasoning has been able to separate the two. I gave the bottle away.

Conversely I have one I wore constantly during a stretch when everything was going right, and putting it on genuinely lifts my mood. I’m aware this is suggestible. I don’t care, because it works.

Which is an argument for wearing the good things during the good periods, rather than saving them. You’re not just using up a liquid. You’re laying something down.

A note on being a large woman and smelling expensive

I’ll be honest about a layer of this that took longer to unpick.

There’s a particular set of assumptions that attaches itself to fat women, and one of the most persistent is a whispered suggestion about hygiene. It’s rarely said outright. It arrives as a joke, or a look, or an advert selling you freshness in a way that isn’t selling freshness to anyone else. Plenty of larger women I know are meticulous to the point of ritual, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

For a while I wore fragrance defensively. As proof. As a pre-emptive argument.

I don’t do that anymore, and the shift was subtle but total. I wear perfume now the way I wear a good coat: because I like it, because it pleases me, because the world is nicer when it smells of something I chose. Not as evidence submitted to a jury that was never entitled to sit.

That’s the version I’d recommend. It’s considerably more fun.

The wider version of the habit

Once I’d noticed it in the perfume drawer I started finding it everywhere, which is how these things go.

The good towels, kept for guests, while I used the thin ones that had gone slightly grey. Guests stay in my house perhaps twelve nights a year. I dry myself in it three hundred and sixty-five times, and I had allocated the pleasant version to visitors.

The wine glasses that lived on a high shelf because they were breakable. I broke two, eventually, and it was fine. It transpires that the purpose of a glass is to be drunk from and not to survive.

The good notebook, unwritten in for years, because nothing I was going to put in it seemed sufficiently worthy of the paper. I want to be clear about how ridiculous that is. I was ranking my own thoughts against stationery, and the stationery was winning.

There’s a particular flavour of this that runs through a lot of women’s lives, and it isn’t really about objects. It’s a rehearsal habit. The sense that the current arrangement is provisional and the real one starts later, once some condition is met. The right relationship, the right house, the right body. Meanwhile everything nice stays in its packaging, awaiting the authorised version of your life.

I lost most of my twenties to a version of that, and I’d rather not lose my forties too.

How to actually enjoy it

Keep it in the dark. A cupboard, a drawer, the box it came in. Not the windowsill, however pretty the bottle. Cool and dark buys you years.

Buy smaller bottles of the things you love. The large size is better value on paper and worse value in practice if it takes you six years to get through it. I would rather finish a 30ml and feel that small satisfaction than nurse a 100ml into old age.

Have more than one. Not as a collection to photograph. As a wardrobe. Something bright for the morning, something heavier for winter evenings, something you wear when you want to feel unbothered. I have one that I associate so strongly with a particular good stretch of my life that putting it on genuinely changes my mood, which is either evidence of the deep link between scent and memory or evidence that I’m suggestible. Possibly both.

And use the whole bottle. Get to the bottom of it. There’s an odd pleasure in finishing something entirely, which I never experienced during all those years of careful preservation.

The drawer bottle went in the bin, in the end. I’d like to say I felt philosophical about it. Mostly I was annoyed about the money.

But it did rearrange something. I stopped treating my own life as a rehearsal for a better-attended one. The good perfume is for Tuesday. The nice glasses are for whatever I’m drinking tonight. The dress that needs an occasion can have this one, because I’m going out in it, and that’s the occasion.

Nothing is being wasted on me.