Move mishap!
I don't know how many of you know this, but I love perfume oils, mostly from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs. I got introduced to them by a friend a decade ago, and have collected them ever since. I had 20-25 bottles and over 200 small vials (at a guess).
Because I was flying out to CA, and TSA is so finicky about liquids, I packed my 3 boxes of perfume up with other heat sensitive things (LUSH massage bars, a bucket of shea butter, my essential oils, so on). My fiance was supposed to bring it in the car so that it didn't have to be shipped in the moving container, which was likely to see quite a bit more heat than the inside of a car with air conditioning. I left 2 days before he did, because that was a convenient day for me to fly.
Unfortunately, the last day of the move was complete chaos - my fiance and my father weren't even able to get all of our furniture and whatnot cleared out of the unit. And my basket, which had all my perfume and whatnot? My fiance forgot to bring that basket. He compounded the error by emailing the landlord that they could get rid of the things in the apartment. By the time I knew the basket hadn't made it out of the apartment, it had been disposed of.
I found a place where I can get the one I was most destroyed about losing, because I wore it on a number of dates early in my relationship with the fiance, including our first date. I associate the scent of Hunger Moon with the effervescent feeling of an infatuation that has become a deep and abiding love.
I'm still pretty upset about the rest of it, though. At a very rough guess, I must have paid something like $600 or more for my perfumes, and some of them have only increased in value since then as they became rarer (though I think most have been pretty stable in value).
It's going to take me a long time to build up my collection, and it's going to be hard and expensive to find some of the rarer scents. I'm very unhappy about the situation, but I don't want to make the fiance feel too bad about it - he takes things very hard when he makes a mistake that upsets me. It's going to take me years to gather up a similar collection. I'm feeling deeply disheartened.
I know it seems like a shallow thing, but our sense of smell is tied surprisingly tightly to our emotional state, and to our memories. That's why smelling your grandma's cookie recipe over the holidays takes you back to when she was there, or why the scent of chlorine reminds you of summers spent in the pool with your childhood friends. And for me...it's one of the very few ways I get to feel 'pretty' anymore. I mean, I don't hate my body, but I don't feel attractive like I used to when I was younger and thinner. And living in a disabled body only makes it harder to feel attractive, because there is such a pervasive social message about how ugly and awful disability is. I can't wear most conventional perfumes; many give me trouble breathing, others give me terrible headaches. So being introduced to BPAL was exciting. And now my whole collection is gone. The scents I use to relax and help me get to sleep, the ones that make me feel powerful and feisty, the ones that make me feel sexy, the playful ones, the ones that help me concentrate...they're all gone.
I hate moving.
Because I was flying out to CA, and TSA is so finicky about liquids, I packed my 3 boxes of perfume up with other heat sensitive things (LUSH massage bars, a bucket of shea butter, my essential oils, so on). My fiance was supposed to bring it in the car so that it didn't have to be shipped in the moving container, which was likely to see quite a bit more heat than the inside of a car with air conditioning. I left 2 days before he did, because that was a convenient day for me to fly.
Unfortunately, the last day of the move was complete chaos - my fiance and my father weren't even able to get all of our furniture and whatnot cleared out of the unit. And my basket, which had all my perfume and whatnot? My fiance forgot to bring that basket. He compounded the error by emailing the landlord that they could get rid of the things in the apartment. By the time I knew the basket hadn't made it out of the apartment, it had been disposed of.
I found a place where I can get the one I was most destroyed about losing, because I wore it on a number of dates early in my relationship with the fiance, including our first date. I associate the scent of Hunger Moon with the effervescent feeling of an infatuation that has become a deep and abiding love.
I'm still pretty upset about the rest of it, though. At a very rough guess, I must have paid something like $600 or more for my perfumes, and some of them have only increased in value since then as they became rarer (though I think most have been pretty stable in value).
It's going to take me a long time to build up my collection, and it's going to be hard and expensive to find some of the rarer scents. I'm very unhappy about the situation, but I don't want to make the fiance feel too bad about it - he takes things very hard when he makes a mistake that upsets me. It's going to take me years to gather up a similar collection. I'm feeling deeply disheartened.
I know it seems like a shallow thing, but our sense of smell is tied surprisingly tightly to our emotional state, and to our memories. That's why smelling your grandma's cookie recipe over the holidays takes you back to when she was there, or why the scent of chlorine reminds you of summers spent in the pool with your childhood friends. And for me...it's one of the very few ways I get to feel 'pretty' anymore. I mean, I don't hate my body, but I don't feel attractive like I used to when I was younger and thinner. And living in a disabled body only makes it harder to feel attractive, because there is such a pervasive social message about how ugly and awful disability is. I can't wear most conventional perfumes; many give me trouble breathing, others give me terrible headaches. So being introduced to BPAL was exciting. And now my whole collection is gone. The scents I use to relax and help me get to sleep, the ones that make me feel powerful and feisty, the ones that make me feel sexy, the playful ones, the ones that help me concentrate...they're all gone.
I hate moving.