Let's Talk About Wearing Perfume to Bed
On finding the special in the mundane.
At the beginning of this year, I saw a TikTok of what I believe is now called a clean girl (or maybe a vanilla girl? IDK, I’m getting old), showing off a haul of goodies she’d gotten at an estate sale in LA. There was an armful of vintage designer dresses with the tags still on, unused exotic perfumes, and uncorked bottles of lavish champagnes going back as far as the eighties. As I watched, the algorithm clocked my interest, spitting up more and more videos of others sharing what they’d bought from the same sale, relics from the life of some Hollywood grand dame who’d surely had decades of piping hot chamomile to spill. There was something beautiful about it, to be sure – all these pieces going on to find new homes, have new lives, become part of new stories with these vibrant and eager young women. But I also found myself unsettled, so much so that I kept thinking about the videos for several months.
It wasn’t until this fall, when I was thinking about how to articulate Weird Bitch Season, that I realized what I found so unnerving about them. Here was all this evidence of a life lived, items pored over and maybe coveted and saved for and perhaps gifted, kept pristine and untouched for special days that never came. Even writing that just now kind of gave me the creeps. I wonder, now, if in her final days the original owner had a spare moment to wish that she’d just popped the 1983 bottle of Dom Perignon and drank the damn thing. I think many of us can relate to this – saving things for “special” days, and there’s nothing necessarily inherently wrong with the idea. But I do wonder why special days always seem to be so out of reach – why aren’t any of our “normal” days special too?
On my 26th birthday, I was given an expensive bottle of perfume that remained unopened for years. I carried it from New York to LA to Lagos to Abuja and back to New York without even opening the box – why? I was saving it for something “special,” a day worthy of it, whatever that means. I’m prone to this, saving even the most random things like nice pens for journals that are “good enough,” but even I could recognize that my behavior was OD. Somehow, even a literal year inside as a result of an unprecedented pandemic was not enough for me to shake this habit (I’m a Taurus; we’re stubborn.) It was only this past October, when I had my epiphany about why that estate sale gave me the heebie jeebies, that I cracked the seal of the box on a random weekday just before bed. At first, I sprayed it gingerly behind my ears, like I was scared some kind of special occasion police were going to run up on me and yoke me up. When my freedom remained intact, I went overboard, dousing myself in a sweet amber cloud and promptly heading off to bed, so as not to miss my strict 10pm bedtime (did I mention I’m a Taurus?).
Since then, I’ve only ever worn it to bed, for the pleasure of no one but me in the privacy of my obnoxiously feminine (and only becoming more so) bedroom. (I love it there, if it wasn’t obvious.) Why I’ve yet to wear it out I can’t exactly say, but I love the act of pairing something indulgent, maybe even a little extravagant, with something as mundane as going to bed. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that perhaps we’ve gotten it all mixed up, that the mundane is the special stuff.
Don’t get me wrong – I love to serve looks for fancy events and travel and go to concerts as much as anyone else. But let me be real. Everyday, I wake up in a safe, warm bed with access to clean running water for no reason but the good fortune to have been born in a country where this is (mostly) the norm. (That, and having parents who had the drive and made the sacrifices to get me here.) My heart beats and my lungs expand on their own j’s; my task is simply to be a good steward to the body and mind I’ve been given. What could possibly be more special than that? I’m getting ooey gooey mushy gushy, so I’ll stop here – but you see my point. Life is for living now. In fact, you are living now, regardless of whether you feel so or not. By the time this is published, the moments I’ve spent drafting it will be gone forever. The time you just spent reading that sentence? Yeah, that’s gone too. But don’t get shook. That’s not the point, and fear is a hindrance, not fuel, as I’ve said before. I say that only to invigorate, to remind you that we only do this shit once, so you better run this p while you can, enjoying the small stuff along the way – because the small stuff is the point.
There’s a James Baldwin quote to which I return often, from an essay in his The Fire Next Time: “We had the liquor, we had the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is…freedom…” In context, he’s talking about the joy he felt at church parties, and later, when he left the church, the basement jazz gatherings that became his new house of worship. But I’ve been stuck on this passage for years because of the simplicity of what constitutes Baldwin’s joy, his freedom: sustenance, community, the ability to live free of pretense, the ability to live at all. And so I ask again – what could possibly be more special than that?
As for me, I will be debuting feathered crop tops at my local bodega, buying flowers at random to celebrate my ability to see and touch and smell them, and popping bottles whenever the fancy strikes me to commemorate the fact that I have entered my goddess era. To that end: wear the dress, write in the journal, uncork the bottle. What are you waiting for?
And there we have it! Next week I’m coming clean about my enduring obsession with Jake Paul, the obscenely goofy Vine star turned YouTuber turned Disney Channel actor turned pro boxer turned MMA fighter.
I’ll leave you all with two images that have been on my mind this week:
And
Until next Sunday,
Lola xx