POWER
IN A
BOTT LE
Forget shoulder pads and
an immaculate blow-dry,
it’s your scent that
indicates you’re a force
to be reckoned with
WORDS: EMMA SMITH
PHOTOGRAPHY: NATO WELTON
erfume is about
pleasure; an art form
created purely to
P stimulate the senses.
To the Ancient
Egyptians, it was used to win favour
with the gods. To Louis XIV, it
represented green-fingered indulgence
(his garden’s fountains flowed with
precious aromatics). But what does
scent represent to you? The essence
of a designer lifestyle? True love, à
la Napoleon, when he wrote to his
beloved Josephine and begged: “Don’t
bathe”? Or nostalgia? Like the smell
of Cacharel’s Anaïs Anaïs taking you
back to your adolescent years of Doc
Marten boots and posters peeling from
your bedroom wall? Or perhaps it’s the
soapiness of aldehydes (first famously
used in Chanel No. 5), evoking
memories of your mother?
In truth, it’s more than all these
things. We use perfume to make our
presence felt. Its fragrance triggers a
release of hormones from the brain,
which in turns effects our mood. So
the scent we use isn’t just a reflection
of taste; it affects our image, the way
we behave, the manner in which others
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respond to us, and most importantly
how we feel. Perfume can be more
effective than a killer outfit; it can
rewrite the psyche. In short, it can
make you powerful. Or at least it
can when you find the right one.
“When you wear the correct
perfume, you smell right in terms of
how you feel,” says Professor Geoffrey
Beattie, head of psychological sciences
at the University of Manchester. “There
is a direct impact on your non-verbal
communication, and you tend to make
more certain movements.” This was
demonstrated by an experiment
Proctor & Gamble conducted in
Japan to register the effect that a
pleasant-smelling perfume had on
people in an interview situation. The
study found an increase of selfadaptors
– self-comforting
movements such as touching
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