Give Me Strength!

HUGELY long-lasting fragrances to carry you when the going gets tough (and one of them is under £22)

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

If there are times you need a fragrance that’s not only long-lasting, a scent that doesn’t merely imbue you with its strength, it takes charge, it lifts you up and carries you, gasping with wonder at the immensity of the universe… have I got a perfumed power list for you!

These monumental scents sometimes cringingly get called ‘Beast Mode’ on the sorts of forums where people feverishly compare batch codes of fragrances, declaring some inferior, while others are granted ‘BM’ status (as though major perfume houses whip up thirty bottles a time at their kitchen tables, mixing ingredients by eye, in the manner of a Brown Owl making fudge for a church hall charity sale). 

What they mean by ‘Beast Mode’, I believe, is that their batch-code-approved scents will punch everyone in the face from a great distance (at which surely is the preferred distance most people stay from such types). 

This is not what I mean by ‘Strong’, in the context of this feature. Although, I will grant you, several of them could be reached for when you need a fragrance that feels weaponised, swiping people out the path before you. 

Instead of some stereotypical representation of alpha male’s bared teeth, bottled; what the following fragrances represent to me, is the calm to be found in a scented submission. Not a natural tendency of mine. I bristle at the very idea of giving in, to ANYTHING or anyone. But I found myself changing my mind a bit during the most unlikely scenario: a coach trip on holiday a few years ago.

Milky Way photographed in La Palma, stargazerslounge.com

I was with my dear friend, and we’d decided on the spur of the moment to book a stargazing trip as part of the four days we were away. La Palma - the smallest of the Canary Islands, known chiefly as the birthplace of shoe designer Manolo Blahnik - also happens to have been the first place in the world that was designated a Starlight Reserve, protected in order to prevent light pollution, and therefore still one of the top places to observe the night sky. We didn’t know when we booked it, but this unprepossessing coach-journey through backroads then forests as we climbed the hills, and finally to a completely unremarkable car park… well. It’s fair to say it changed my life. Or at least, the way I look at it. 

When we emerged from the coach, we looked up, and I genuinely staggered and nearly fell over backwards. If you have never experienced the full majesty of seeing that swirl of the Milky Way in person, I can tell you that it hits you like a tonne of bricks. You feel giddy with smallness, as though you’re floating before the immensity of it all. As you’re guided to peer through a telescope at stars being born, at Andromeda swallowing galaxies whole (just as she will eat ours, one day), it’s impossible not to gawp and swallow something hard and jagged, yourself: the realisation that we are microscopic specks, a fleeting moment inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. And while of course that’s emotional wounding to one’s ego, it can also be (I found, anyway), hugely soothing to troubled souls. 

Space Queen by Morysetta

These fragrances grant me something of that feeling. Giving yourself up to their strength, their vastness. I wear them on days where I don’t necessarily want to feel stronger, strangely. It’s more complicated than that. It’s when I don’t want to be the adult. I don’t want to be the one in charge, for a change, whose shoulders must take the burden of everything. I spray them when I want to feel that someone (something) else is in charge. That they’re taking my hand and expertly steering me through a crowd. That nobody will try me while I wearing them, they wouldn’t dare - not when I’m protected by such a burly bodyguard who will fight for me no matter what, or who, tries to get in my way. 

Though Emily Brontë was referring to her belief in God as a higher power, here, I get what she was saying: 

Emily Brontë - No Coward Soul is Mine

With wide-embracing love

Thy Spirit animates eternal years,

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

So yes. These give me a sense of scented submission. A pause of responsibility. I am helpless in their wake - I giggle joyously at their Brobdingnagian proportions. I give in. 

Occasionally, when the time is right, I highly recommend it. And all of these…