Guest Post from Nappy Valley Girl

A big thank you to NappyValleyGirl for providing this touching guest post. Lovely to hear about the fragrances you've worn.
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My first bottle of perfume was stolen goods. Not by me, I hasten to add…..but by a boy called Michael Carter, who I used to walk to school with aged about 7. He ran up behind me one day, blushed, and slipped something into my satchel. Back at home, my mother and I had a look — it was a bottle of Charlie. We reckoned he must have stolen it from his mother or older sister, and given it to me as some kind of love token. I can’t recall whether we attempted to give it back – possibly it was too embarrassing for all concerned.
Anyway, it was my first taste of the potency of fragrance. As a child, I watched my mother spraying on some of the Eighties favourites with darkly dangerous names: Poison, Opium, Obsession. They smelt deliciously heady and glamorous, and usually meant she was heading off to some smart expat cocktail party (we were living in Hong Kong). Perhaps taking inspiration from her tastes, when I was about 14, I requested a bottle of LouLou by Cacharel for Christmas. This, too, was potent and vampy — but a massive marketing drive through the likes of Just Seventeen magazine had made it a brand much-coveted by teenage girls.
Then the eighties ended and everything changed. The scents we wanted were the antithesis of the heady 80s brews we had all desired — clean, floral and perhaps a little boring. My sister wore a lemony Calvin Klein concoction while for years my fragrance of choice was White Linen by Estee Lauder phase. It made me imagine I was wafting, serene and beautiful, and in lovely neutral clothing along a windswept beach. Very 90s.
During my first years as a business journalist, I travelled widely for business and would always try on the latest brands in airports. Trouble was, I couldn't stick to one – I always went for a quick squirt of Chanel as well and no doubt I would have been turning up to press conferences with dour German businessmen smelling like a brothel.
Then I took a job on a beauty trade magazine. What a revelation. I had to attend, and write about the latest launches too (and I learnt that it's always 'fragrance' — perfume is a dirty word in the beauty industry.) I learnt how to decipher ridiculous press releases about new scents (usually written in very bad attempts at poetry) and how to interpret the language of fragrance — of top notes, florals, sandalwood, musk. And I received loads of free samples, some of which lasted me for years.
But that was ten years ago and now there are just two bottles of scent on my dressing table — Diorissimo, an old favourite which I love, and Gucci's Flora, a Christmas present from my sister which is light, floral and not so overpowering you can't wear it during the day. At home with the kids, I rarely wear any fragrance — I have to remember to put it on. Add to that a husband who has virtually no sense of smell, and I often wonder what the point is. Yet to me, spraying on delicious scent is always an essential part of the ritual of preparing for an evening out; filled with promise and glamour.