SOTD: Hermes Terre d'Hermes (And sugar and spice and modern women's scents)

I don't like girly scents. Sweet pink ruffly bottles of flowers and syrup and fruit that bat their eyes and giggle? Scents designed to please and flirt? Not for me.

But I've learned in the past few months that I do like women's scents. Scents that would tend to be inappropriate on a teenager. Even, or perhaps especially, drop-dead femme fatale scents. A scent that could be worn by Jane Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman? That's fine with me. Even, in fact, if those women are wearing ruffles. This tells me that I'm not opposed to femininity, not at all.

So what do those women have? They have presence. And presence means power. This brings me to the realization that what I object to are scents that reassure one's audience by signaling a complete lack of power.

Many modern women's scents make me think of those men that try to tell women to "smile!" when the woman isn't being decorative enough for their taste. I don't want to smell like a woman who would give an apologetic start and provide that smile. I want to smell like the woman who would make that man shrink into his shoes with one raised eyebrow.

Now, some women can wear lacy ruffled fruity flowers and still strike that eyebrow blow. I suspect that they're the same ones who draw power, instead of helplessness, from a fine pair of high heels. I'm not one of those women. Femininity doesn't come naturally to me. I've discussed that.

All of which brings me, sort of, to Terre d'Hermes. Or at least to men's fragrances. Men's fragrances, whatever else one might say about them, almost never suffer from a lack of power. Men's fragrances don't smile on command, or simper, or flirt. They may charm. They may say, "Well, hello, there." But there's always an underlying base of "This is what I smell like. You wanna make something of it?"

I like that. Now, I don't always need a full dose of it, which is why the vast majority of my bottles are unisex fragrances, and most of the rest are femme fatale fragrances. But once in a while I want a fragrance that has no intention whatsoever of smiling unless it's in the mood. Which brings me, again, to Terre d'Hermes. I may finally talk about it now.

So what does it smell like? To me, it smells like sharp dark gravel and peppered orange peels, with a wakeup effect like a cup of coffee. (Well, like I imagine a cup of coffee. I don't actually drink the stuff.) The bitter, volatile elements of the orange fade in a little while, as oranges always do, and for a few hours their function is replaced with a dose of bitter vetiver. The bitterness is a little much, but just as I'm ready to declare that it's too much, it fades away. The final remains are very close to the skin and quite out of character for the rest of the development - soft, woody, and sweet, like the remains of something that had vanilla.

I like it. But now that I've had a day of it, I may not need that much power again for a little while.

Review Roundup: Now Smell This and Bois de Jasmin and Perfume-Smellin' Things and PereDePierre and The Non-Blonde and nioi and Basenotes and Fragrantica and MakeupAlley.

Photo of Myrna Loy: Wikimedia Commons.
Painting of smiling woman: Wikimedia Commons.