We Like To Call This Fine Scent Eau De Landfill

It’s time to criminalize perfume.

I know that sounds extreme, but you haven’t poked a nose into my house lately. My 12-year-old daughter, Kate, took some of her baby-sitting money and bought a bottle of CK One. A fog has now enveloped her room, a reeking cloud that can be penetrated only with flashlight and gas mask.

My wife says she doesn’t know which is worse, the smell or the fact that Kate actually put money into the coffers of Calvin Klein, one of America’s foremost sleazemeisters.

Yeah, well, the smell is definitely worse. Calvin Klein might be a threat to the nation’s moral fiber, but his perfume is actually a threat to the nation’s eyes, ears, noses and throats.

My daughter, of course, thinks we are being hopelessly wimpy. Her position is: If you can’t stand the reek, stay out of my room.

I understand her position. When I was her age, I had far more tolerance for the pleasures of the nose. I used to get into my dad’s medicine cabinet and splash on colognes with names like English Leather, Hai Karate, Old Spice, Old Saddlebags, Old Drunken Sailor and Old Rotted Citrus Fruit. I loved all that stuff; many were the times I would come downstairs smelling like a cross between a catcher’s mitt, a lime Jell-O mold, a losing Derby horse and a clipper-ship sailor who had spilled grog all over himself.

By the time I reached dating age, I learned some restraint, but not much. I knew enough not to combine colognes into a kind of noxious salad dressing. However, I still believed that the proper way to apply the stuff was to slather it on as thickly as Fat Willy slathers barbecue sauce on a rack of ribs.

I remember wondering why my date wanted the car window open.

“It’s … warm in here,” she would say. “But you’re letting the snow in,” I would say.

Only now do I understand why my dad had eight different bottles of cologne on his bathroom shelf. He got them on Father’s Day and never used a single one of them. He had come to the same conclusion that I have about artificial scents: People smell just fine in their natural states as long as they are reasonably diligent about bathing.

For many centuries of human existence, however, people were not diligent about bathing. In fact, people like the Elizabethans shared the Wicked Witch of the West’s opinion about water: It would cause them to melt. I believe the ancient Egyptians felt the same way, because they are the ones who first extracted the precious oils from flowers and herbs to make perfumes.

I have no quarrel with the Egyptians over this. Smelling like a rose or a lilac is infinitely preferable to smelling like some guy who has been plowing the fertile delta behind the rear end of an oxen all day. If I was in ancient Egypt, standing next to some woman who had spent the past 40 years tending a camel, I would be thanking Isis for the gift of perfume.

I think things have gotten out of hand today, that’s all. With the invention of synthetic scents and artificial flavors, manufacturers have created what seems less like perfume and more like nerve gas. Anybody who gets out in public knows what I’m talking about. You’re in the elevator, minding your own business, when in walks someone who has been bathing in their Obsession, or showering in their Stetson.

By the time you reach your floor, a Superfund grant is required to detoxify the elevator car.

The heaviest perfume users, it seems, are the very young and the very old. The very young, like my daughter, are in love with the idea of creating their own personal force fields around themselves. The very old just keep splashing it on because they can’t smell it any more. So we need criminalization of perfume to protect these people from themselves, as well as to protect their innocent victims. But mainly, we need criminalization of perfume for one very simple, humanitarian reason: We must make it safe to read magazines again.

Too many people have been stricken down in their prime by perfume ads. Just think of all the senseless tragedies that could be averted if the world were truly scents-less.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review