From potpourri to diffusers: why is the modern world so smelly?
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Version 0 of 1. Scented candles are apparently now part of everyday ‘self-care’. When did air freshener stop being good enough, asks Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore Potpourri is back. Of course it is. I don’t want to come over all Hyacinth Bucket, but isn’t it a bit déclassé? Hadn’t we become more modern? More hyggey? I have only just got over the news that scented candles are probably causing the destruction of the planet, and now this. We spend £90m a year on scented candles in the UK, of which about £80m is down to me, ever since the cat pissed in the living room. Astonishingly, though, I have read that a scented candle is now part of everyday “self-care”. Destroy the patriarchy or have a bath with a smelly candle and pretend the world is OK? It’s a dilemma. Since no one has used air freshener since the 90s – no one middle class, that is, and certainly none of the woke zombies who say “chemicals” are bad, as if they themselves are made of a material unknown to science – candles and upmarket joss sticks called “diffusers” have taken over. I need something to exhume the scent of vile bath bombs (we are living through what I call the body spray years in my house – at some point people will stop wanting to smell like strawberries, but we are not there yet). When did everything get so smelly? I am often overpowered by perfume on the tube. And not in a good way. It’s rather like the incident I had in Waitrose when I was made faint by the smell of nit lotion in my hair, but had to pretend to be anaemic while they got me a chair. There is wanting to smell nice, there is the covering of bad smells and then there is this new insanity where your own little world is excessively perfumed. In the end, we all breathe the same air. Radical, I know. • Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist |