The Scent of a Woman, Part III.

When it comes to their sense of smell, women are vastly superior to men.

The Nordstrom’s I peruse has a wide regal entrance. When you pass through it your senses are seduced by the women’s cosmetics area to your immediate left, where beautiful women are doing their best to make pretty and not so pretty women look prettier.  Being attractive is a very big thing for women, much more so than it is for men. Pregnancy, and childbearing wreaks large blows to a woman’s appearance, her self-esteem, and her resume. Which explains why the makers of strollers meant for running women, are doing so well. Looking good is moy importante to women. It can mean the difference between getting a promotion or not, as most women go back to work eventually. Men are clueless. This is why at Nordstom’s, Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Ann Taylor, Abercrombie & Fitch, and other haute couture stores, and even the lower couture stores - you will find women’s cosmetics areas ten times larger than their men’s cologne areas. This is the way it is, and will always be: women simply have a more developed sense of smell than men. Sorry guys, it’s a scientific fact.

Scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, collected micro-droplets of male and female human perspiration, and had men and women sniff the vials. The vials smelled equally odious to both men and women. Then the sweaty scientists mixed the perspiration samples with 32 different fragrances. The result: the men could only smell a nuance of perspiration in 19 of the mixtures. The women were able to smell 30. The study also showed that men’s body odors are harder to mask than women’s. Only a fifth of the fragrances could cover up the male perspiration odor. But why is a woman’s sense of smell so much better than a man’s? The structures of the noses of men and women are identical. It was found that women’s brains have a larger area devoted to the sense of smell. The answer? Monell’s study has shown it has to do with estrogen levels. Estrogen makes women more sensitive to scents. But again, it begs the question -why do women have a better sense of smell from a biological point of view? Why would that be important for the survival of the species? I'll get to that in a minute. First, lets' take a stroll around the tango.


Romance is a complicated love potion, and the Creator of the Universe is in the business of making love potions, so naturally it is well thought out. But the human side of the equation is like a love song that never ends. Scent is vital to the success of this marvelous plan. As a romantic, I imagine love stories evolving from shoes set side by side by sidewalks, a songbird, a cloud, a key, light skimming across an old desk, old photos of people found in an antique store trunk, the way a man looks at a woman and a woman looks at a man. For several years I have been a fan of tango. It is the most romantic of dances. To do the tango properly, the partners must make a connection. I had thought this meant they had to know one another before they began dancing, or they had to have been dance partners for a period of time, in love -preferably, to allow them to be in synch with each others movements. No, this is not the case. I learned this firsthand while in Perugino's coffee bar, on Willamette Street, in Eugene, Oregon, watching tango dancers glide past my table. Your heart would have to be made of stone not to be moved by watching two people connect while dancing the tango. Perugino's is a great hangout for coffee cognoscenti, and de rigeur for those whose romantic streak is as wide as the eiffel tower is tall. I sat many times beneath the self portrait by the master himself, that dominates the room, while under the influence of Perugino's coffee concoctions, nibbling Salade Niçoise, and while sipping excellent micro brews and wines. I gazed with lanquid eyes at the tango dancers, who sometimes spilled onto the street on balmy summer and fall evenings, when romance could not be contained within the narrow confines of the building. No show at the Uffizi Gallery could compete with skilled tango dancers, for pure artistry. Il divin pittore.


The best tango scene was in "Scent of  Woman" (1992) that starred Al Pacino, Gabrielle Anwar, and Chris O'Donnell.  Pacino plays the part of blind, bitter, retired Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a man bent on killing himself. Charlie Simms, (Chris O'Donnell) a student at an exclusive New England prep school, to pay for a flight home for Christmas, accepts a temporary job over the Thanksgiving weekend, helping Slade get his affairs in order. Slade takes Simms to New York, and they stay at the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWNp3-r6SHw where Slade intends to end it all. Slade wants to go out with a bang, (literally), and manages to talk Simms into letting him drive a Ferrari. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itr0jcR0S4s Simms must tell him where to turn, or Slade will wreck the car. Over dinner, Slade informs Simms of his plan to "blow his brains out." While in the dining room, Slade sniffs out the scent of a young woman near them, (Anwar), and he and she dance a memorable tango while she is waiting the arrival of her fiancé.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHhSVJ_S6A I often went to Perugino's on First Friday Art Walk, when the galleries opened their doors and people mingled and sipped wine while gazing at works of art. I watched tango dancers dance in the narrow space between the collection of tables and the bar. Mood Area 52, was often there, led by the singing and accordion playing of Michael Roderick, a Eugene teacher,  and several other talented musicians, including cellist Amy Danziger. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpppOOuCaVg I marveled at the couples who did not know one another, yet moved effortlessly to the tango music. I knew a man who taught milonga tango, and I tried my hand at it at the Tango Center in downtown for about a year. So when I think of romance, I think of tango, and when I think of tango I think of the film, "Scent of a Woman," and when I think of women, I think of their uncanny ability - their marvelous sense of smell. Romance is dead without the right scent, and God gave women the gift of sniffing out the right mate. God is pretty smart.

But back to the scientific side of the story of scent. The scent theory has to do with breeding. Yes – SEX – that sweaty three-letter word. The sweaty scientists at Monell have deduced that if a woman can smell sex hormones, due to her superhuman endowment of estrogen, and a man’s body odor is stronger than a woman’s, then there is a good chance a woman can “sample” the masculinity of men by sniffing them. It is a vestige of our primitive origins - our ape ancestry. It was especially important for survival; a woman needed a strong mate to father and protect she and her children. This also explains something I’ve heard women say from time to time regarding their intuition about gay men. I have known more than one woman who has remarked, “My gay-dar went off when I met him.” Now, this may not be the definitive test for detecting gay men, but perhaps it is rooted in biology. Men are men, whether they are gay or straight, but perhaps a few men have lower testosterone levels, and these are ones the women can “sniff” out. I read somewhere that women and men have tiny laboratories in specialized glands on the inside of their cheeks. These glands test for hormones. This comes in handy when men and women are kissing, which they have been doing since Year One. The glands of women test for testosterone, and the glands of men test for estrogen. I have a not so funny story to share about that, but I will refrain and get back to my trip to Nordstrom’s olfactory oasis.

 Okay, okay; I will tell all, you should be told. I have no secrets. I unknowingly once went out with a transgender man, on more than one date. The dates were all centered around learning to salsa and tango from a private teacher, in her studio in Eugene. Were there clues, olfactory clues, that he was a she, under $100,000 of surgical alteration? You betcha. But a man gets lonely. If I'd had the sense of smell a woman does it never would have happened. He, um, she, was a geology professor at a university. There is no sense in beating me up about it; I have done that to myself already. Now I just laugh about it. The relationship was doomed from the start; my sexual needle points to the far right side of the heterosexual spectrum. It was like that children’s story: Little Red Riding Hood, where the little lady says to the wolf, “My, what big eyes you have,” except in this case it was his/her big hands. A man’s hands are simply bigger than most women’s hands. Big hands means being able to throw big spears and big rocks. It comes in handy to be a man with big hands. John Wayne’s hands made his pistols look like cartoon guns. When John Wayne held a woman in his “hands” she looked like a bug. You get the idea. So this he/she professor had big hands. Those big hands allowed the professor, one night after our learning to tango and salsa at a private studio (taught by an ‘oh so sexy’ blond woman who my olfactory sense of smell told me was a woman through and through), to backhand a ping-pong ball like no woman I’d met. 

I guess that is when the lights went on in my head. They sure hadn’t gone off in my head much up until then. No, I am lying again. They did go off, I just didn’t want to acknowledge the three alarm fire bells going off. I had smelled the guy’s perspiration when we were dancing. He may have had his guy’s down there reconfigured, and he may have had fake breasts put in, and he may have had all the hair electrocuted off his body, but they couldn’t eradicate his sweat glands, (or his big hands, or his prostate). So that is my firsthand sweat story. Okay, I’ll admit the rest of it. Yes, I kissed him/her goodnight one time. Once was more than enough. If I didn’t have a three-alarm fire going on inside my heart when I was putting the big hand thing with the sweat thing, I certainly had once going off when I kissed this dude. I am a charitable man: I can overlook a few things. But this guy/girl could not kiss to save his doctorate degree. In geological terms, his lips were as slippery as slate on a hillside, or a Eocene magma flow, as wet and weird as crude oil bubbling up from the bottom of the sea. I pulled back immediately: my glands were reporting a full-tilt gayness in this fellow/lady. After our fifth date, after the ping-pong at my place, we had our little talk. He/she was in tears; I was wondering if I was the dumbest, most olfactory challenged man in North America. He said, “You wouldn’t have known the difference if we’d made love.” I replied, “No, sir, er. . .madam, you are greatly mistaken. I know the difference between a pouch and a you-know-what. Besides, I’m not some floozy you can tango with a few times and expect to hop into bed with.” Then I grabbed a tissue from my black sparkly purse and sobbed uncontrollably. “Why,” I would say, “you’re nothing but a cad, and, er, a guy, too.” He said, his/her eyes brimming with tears, “You don’t know what it’s like to father two children while being trapped in a man’s body, when you know you’re a woman on the inside!” 

“Sweetheart,” I said, in my best imitation of Humphrey Bogart, “I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but from where I’m sitting I could never look at you and have the word ‘woman’ ever show up in my vocabulary.” And so our brief love affair ended. My relationship with the professor of geology was on the rocks indefinitely. I wanted igneous, he wanted sedimentary, and never the twain would meet, not in one brief geological age. Now when I meet a woman I like, the first time I sense she wants me to ask her out, (based on my crude and inadequate and flawed scent abilities), I ask her if she was born with ovaries. If the answer is “Yes!” then we go to Square Two. So far I have only been slapped twice.

In both Nordstrom’s and Macy’s, which are directly opposite one another, in the mall I frequent, there are glasses containing narrow fragrance test strips made of white paper. There are also glasses containing coffee beans to clear your "palette" as you sniff different fragrances. Perfumes and colognes aren’t cheap; it’s nice to have an idea of what the fragrance smells like before you shell out $50 to $200. I have read that people tend to gravitate to the scent that most closely resembles their own natural scent. Had I had a woman with me I could have found it in five minutes, but as it was I had to sniff a lot of test strips. And here are the top ten men’s cologne fragrances, in the order of my preferences. 

1.) Hugo Boss “Night” (the dark bottle). Sultry, mysterious, perfect for all night gambling in Monaco or Las Vegas. 2.) John Varvatos., (the dark ‘night’ bottle). Exotic, refreshing, sexy; like an Alpha Romeo Spider Veloce on a curvy narrow Spanish highway, with a vivacious blonde speaking love in Spanish, Italian, and French, and with fluent body language. 3.) “Acqua di Gio” by Giorgio Armani. A fresh and pleasant scent, reminiscent of an Italian fashion shoot in the Tuscany region, perhaps at Mussellini’s summer palace, overlooking the fair city of Florence. (Look, isn’t that the ‘David’ sculpture down there? OMG!) 4.) “Guilty Intense” by Gucci. Pure seduction in the piazza, with time in the confessional optional. 5.) “La Nuit de L’Homme” by Yves Saint Laurent. A reliable lady-killer, to be used at midnight in Paris. 6.) “L’Homme Libre” by Yves Saint Laurent. Dangerous, but not lethal. 7.) “Pour homme” by Bulgari. A sensuous fusion of a retired, but still potent - bullfighter, with the ambiance of  a confident, handsome waiter at the restaurant of a five star hotel that your girlfriend fell in love with as he took her order for escargot simmered in a good French wine, shallot, garlic, and butter bisque.  8.) “Pour Monsieur” by Chanel. Not to be used within two kilometers of any convent in the South of France. Considered a concealed weapon in most of the wine growing regions of France.  9.) “Terre D’Hermes” by Hermes of Paris. Like the kiss of an orange heiress aboard a white shiny yacht anchored off the Côte d'Azur. 10.) “Havanna” by Aramis. Wear this and you will believe you are a tango dancer from Cuba with an insatiable need for love with Fidel’s granddaughter.

And now we pause this rather torrid blog for a plethora of romantic banter, to set the tone for Valentine’s Day, which as any cologne-sniffer can tell you, is right around the perfumed corner.  I wrote this to my hypothetical Valentine only yesterday:

“Baby, you are my Valentine, my soul mate. When you wade into the waters, the warm, seductive, sunset tinted lagoon, where pink rose petals are strewn, the waters of love, where many have waded before you - you must make a decision, and the decision is crucial: You must decide to keep walking out until you can no longer feel the bottom with your feet. You must be willing to tread water until your love, your true love, comes for you. I will pull you into my dusty rose colored boat, and you will lie in the bow, in the curve of my embrace - the warm sun drying your hair and clothes, and your skin aching for my love with beads of water still clinging to it. My kisses will buoy you - when you look in my eyes you will see the times ahead, and the times behind, your unborn children, and your grandchildren's children. You will see us in a kitchen making a crepe on a summer morning. You will see us opening gifts and sharing the company of your family on Christmas Day. You will feel my love when I am far from you; you will feel it on the warm summer wind as you look at the moon, while lying on the silk sheets of our rose petal strewn bed, the warm breeze gently stroking your cheeks, and pushing aside the translucent curtains of the open French doors. You will be lovesick, and rise, and stand on the ornate stone paved balcony to watch for my arrival, your arms around your shoulders, and your arms will be like my arms and you will smell my scent in the night as you close your eyes. And in the fall, and in the winter, as you lie by the flickering embers of your fire, by the hearth of your fireplace, when the snowflakes fall gently upon our balcony, I will push open the doors of our love chamber, and there in the flickering fire's light we will kiss softly, slowly, and passionately until our love burns brighter than any flame ever could. And our rings will catch the light and sparkle like a million stars. This is the proof of my love: that I will lay down my life for you – of this you can be sure. My  word is my bond, and your thoughts are knit to mine. When you are with me at last, there by the fire in the cold Spring when love seems as new as the tender new blossoms of the roses in your garden, we will finish each other's sentences, and when I am near you, you will delight in my sultry and mysterious scent. You will say, “Baby, wherever did you find that cologne? It is exactly the kind I picture you wearing.” And I will answer: "Why, at the mall, my love, where men's colognes are fifty percent off."

Best of luck to you, you lovers, and wanna-be lovers. Be safe, do a lot of sniffing before you leap into the arms of love.