Why I Never Finish a Bottle

I’ve never bought a bottle of fragrance twice in my life. I realized this at twenty one, and the strange part is that I already knew it, I was consiocly making the decision of changing into a new bottle, new brand everytime, I was never a one fragrance person, I just hadn’t looked at it directly, or more inwardly. I’m obsessed with fragrances. I own them, I seek them out, I know what I like. and yet I never go back to the same one. although some were very good and hard to replicate, once, maybe twice, and then it gets tossed out. never buying it again.

Until I have had a random moment of processing something, and I discovered why, behind the surface answer. fragrances are one of the few things the brain stores differently. smell bypasses the relay station that every other sense passes through and goes directly to the parts of the brain that hold memory and emotion. a smell puts you back inside it. not the image of the moment, the moment itself. it is scares me.

And I can’t handle that. the fragrance doesn’t know the city it came from doesn’t look the same anymore. it doesn’t know I’m not that person anymore. it just opens the door and expects me to walk through.

Thats why, I keep buying new once, no associations, no ambush. it’s clean. its fresh.