Smelly Old Things - by Kawai Shen - Black Lipstick

blacklipstick.substack.com · 1,330 words · saved by 1 readers

Kawai Shen on uncommon perfume, escaping the feminine youth cult and the transformative power of scent.

I grew up in a cohort of women who divided perfumes into a patriarchal binary: fuckable, or not. Us fuckable girls were too young to recall the fragrance industry as anything other than a multinational marketing machine churning out a pink-hued sea of generic fruity florals, tooth-rotting gourmands and synthetic aquatics. The rest of fragrance history ended up ignobly cast into the dreaded “old lady” category. Into that bin went all the grand dame classics like No. 5, Shalimar, Opium. To us, these were the scents of menopause and spinsterhood. The more bombastic the perfume, the more it aged…

Smelly Old Things - by Kawai Shen - Black Lipstick

related reading