Perfume Diary #9: American Creamsicle (RS)

What good is perfume in times like these? It’s a question I have been asking myself over the course of the last week, as more and more unfathomable headlines keep bubbling to the surface: Cages. Tender age camps. 2300 children who may never see their mothers again. A $39 jacket emblazoned with a punkish rhetorical question, a canvas shrug asking why anyone should bother to care. I know this cruelty isn’t new to our country -- that this is who we have been for centuries, if you cared to peel back Plymouth Rock and look underneath it for worms -- but still, this week has hit so many like a dump truck, and it is hard to shake the rotten smell. This is, I think, why I didn’t wear perfume last week except for once, at a wedding; I didn’t want to mask my anger with amber, or soak my sadness in jasmine water. This is strange: I tend to reach for bottles even when I am in despair; I can mark the lowest moments of my past by remembering what fragrance I grasped onto when feeling like total garbage (which then became, like tequila after a bad binge, scents I can never wear again without feeling nauseated). I think it was that I felt so nauseous already, and I knew that adding flowers to the mix wouldn’t help at all. In any case, today I started wearing perfume again; I also donated to

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