It’s happened to many of us. We fall completely, hopelessly and desperately in love with a fragrance and we discover that it hates our skin. There may be a musty, urine-like or just plain nasty scent that develops on your inner wrist where you optimistically spritzed it on or, even worse, you may develop a full-on rash, tearing eyes, shortness of breath or possibly pass out.  OK the passing out is extremely rare.

There seems to be a Murphy’s Law of perfume wearing that the more we love a fragrance the more quickly the scent disappears. The flip side is that the ones we can’t stand seem to stick to our skin like glue and stalk us for hours.

You’ve encountered what perfume-lovers commonly refer to as a scrubber – a perfume so repellent that you’d rather scrub it off than let it fade away on its own. Your overriding concern is to eliminate the smell ASAP before doing anything else. 

So what to do?

The key here is to be prepared that this may happen.  It happens most often when you’ve just applied a fragrance you loved on the blotter strip and naturally assumed you would appreciate it equally on you. However an adverse reaction may even happen when applying perfumes that you normally love but on this particular day you absolutely detest. 

There are many ineffective methods out there on the internet – such as rubbing coffee grounds into the skin or applying baking soda and white vinegar onto the area. I’ve even heard of people dabbing the affected area with unflavored vodka. These do not work my friends!

What you need to do if you find yourself smelling like a raging stink bomb due to an unfortunate perfume application is this:

Plan A: If this happens at home, the best and fastest way to exterminate the villain is to wipe off any excess fragrance first and then use undiluted hand dishwashing liquid to rub into the area. Amway has a multi-purpose product that works quite well for this. Rub into the area the perfume was applied to for about 15 seconds until thoroughly mixed. Be sure to use  lots of water washing off the mixture.

Plan B: Use alcohol or alcohol swabs to remove the offensive odor. This works best when out for a heavy day of fragrance shopping since you can pack the individually wrapped swabs discretely in your bag as insurance. Rubbing lightly for 5-10 seconds into affected area is key. The biggest drawback to using alcohol is that it can be very drying to the skin. Plus, even although you will have eliminated the hideous perfume scent, you’ll be reeking of alcohol for a while. Not good either!

PS. The opposite of a scrubber is a huffer. A huffer is a perfume that smells out of this world incredible. It smells so amazing in fact that you can’t stop smelling it and are tempted to actually inhale it like an intoxicant. Huffing is OK although you’ll look like a pyscho if you do it in public.

When you meet a huffer you’ll know!

Until the next time,

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