perfume and horses: 1 post

While perfume is a personal pleasure, its sillage means that our fragrance choices are sometimes influenced by the preferences of others–our family, friends, school or office colleagues. What if your perfume selection has to take into account your horse’s tastes? Patricia reports.

Layering two different perfumes is a fun way to play with fragrance and create a new scented experience. I find it interesting, and in principle, I should have accumulated an array of favorite combinations, but I confess that I haven’t made much foray into it. You see, my universal layer most days is not another perfume, but the smell of my horse. I’m an avid rider and go to the barn as often as I can manage to spend time with my boy. And although I love the smell of horses, the forty-minute ride home in an enclosed car can get a little ripe with a mixture of pungent horse sweat, the fecal smell of manure, sour urine notes, and the dry green of hay bales. And that is where perfume comes in.

Without really thinking about it, I’ve collected many horse-friendly scents over the years. Chanel Cristalle is not only lovely on its own, but blends beautifully with barnyard smells and seems to be appreciated by equine noses as well. Other favorites are L’Artisan Parfumeur Séville à l’aube (the slightly dirty quality of white flowers works well with the rich animalic background of the horse barn) and I wore it on the car trip home from the barn for months on end when it was first released in 2012.

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