Hall Of Shame: Most Embarrasing Fragrance Moments

Oh, how funny djuna!
I was considering buying some Jicky earlier today...but that top-note of ass just keeps me from ordering.

My shameful tale:
When I was in high school (loooong time ago ) I was a HUGE fan of Tea Rose by Perfumers Workshop. I guess I was oblivious to my own sillage because the stupid boys who had lockers on the sides of me started to call me "Funeral Parlor". Ugh...boys are SO dumb .

Last summer my boss hired a minivan and crammed 8 of us employees and our partners into it for a 5 hour ride to a town called Horsens, to see the Madonna show.

It had been a long hot day and I had been moving furniture up to the 4th floor (no elevator) so i asked my wife to bring with her from home a deo stick and some frag sample so i can freshen up on the way to the gig.
We sat in the back of the minibus and i applied the (rollon) deo, and spritzed two squirts of Angel Schlesser Pour Homme. Moments later, my colleagues were coughing violently and opening the car windows. NO ONE SPOKE A WORD! They just reacted in this very dramatic way for about 90 seconds, and then continued as if nothing happened! I was mortified!
Bloody weird Danes!

This thread is hilarious!! I can feel your pain guys. Fortunately, I haven't really bumped into any embarrassing fragrance moments so far, but I have had times when I wondered whether my sillage was bothering people. Mostly when, like mentioned in this thread, you're standing in a very crowded place with nowhere to go.

I was wearing Private Collection - Estee Lauder in a taxi one day, many years before. I was clean and fresh and not heavily perfumed! The taxi driver was groaning all the time during the drive that something was smelling badly...I cannot believe the perfume was that bad, on the contrary! I think he was doing it on purpose, just to embarrass me. There can be such people...

You know, I've always been a bit sad that my 'fumes stay so close to my skin, but after reading this thread perhaps it's a blessing! (Especially today after I accidentally tipped an entire Madam X sample over one arm!)

A few weeks ago i applied Nirmala on one wrist and Angel on the other.
In the staffroom that morning I kept getting whiffs of a very sweet alcoholic
smell and commented on it twice (along the lines of "surely we aren't having
sherry trifle for school dinner!") It was only when people kept ignoring me that I realised
my two scents had morphed into NIRMANGEL and it was too much!

Several years ago I purchased a bottle of Obsession and I did not really try it out very well before purchasing. I had it on one day at work and I happened to be taking care of a man who was somewhat confused....while several of my co workers and I were trying to turn him and get him situated in his bed his shouted out *who the hell smells like garlic* to my horror I discovered it was me! Obsession turns to pure garlic on my skin...and have you ever tried to wash Obsession off? I immediately gave that bottle to my sister in law and dammit it smelled fabulous on her!

A few months ago, I wore Bois Farine to work, and gave myself that extra spritz...
As I hugged a dear friend, she pulled away violently and growled, "Peanuts !
I HATE peanuts ! I'm ALLERGIC to PEANUTS !"

I had to explain,shamefacedly, that there were no peanuts...
Needless to say, I don't wear it to work anymore...

A couple of months ago, I spritzed on some of Rance's Josephine when I was in a shop. Its top notes are lovely. Unfortunately, its middle and bottom turned into something that was, frankly, foul on me...and I had to get the tube in rush hour and then a very crowded train to get back home.

People on the underground were pulling faces while I, mortified, pretended it was someone else. On the train, once we'd stopped at enough stations for some seats to free up, the man next to me positively sprinted to the end of the carriage and sat there instead. My husband picked me up at the station, went to give me a kiss, backed off and said 'What the *hell* is that? You've not bought it, have you?'

About ten years ago, I was wearing Gap Grass (which I still have a secret, trashy love affair with) in my university's computer lab. (This was a place full of late adolescents who smell like bacon - fragrance was a necessity.) The department cleaner walked past me, said 'Pewwwwwww!' and then announced to the room that I smelled like his toilet cleaner.

Oooh I love Grass too. Toilet cleaner? Noooo! How dare he!
(Keep on with the funny stories, you're brightening up my dull work day!)

Just yesterday on the train to London: I was sitting there in what I considefed to be a delightful Shocking cloud. Loving the gorgeous honey-ness of it. Then a lady sat down next to me. She spent the entire journey with a tissue practically crammed up her nose, and about every 30 seconds she stuck a nasal spray up one or other nostril and had a squirt. I was convinced it was me, but maybe she just had hay fever or something...

The year was 2005 and I had that wonderful bottle of Hermes Faubourg, 24 perfume. While new it opened without a problem, but then I kinda forgot about it (for approximately the whole year) and the stopper was stuck. In my numerous attempts to open it, I was desperate as nothing seemed to work. I decided to use my own teeth: the result was that I bit off the neck and ended up with my mouth full of precious liquid. To this day I would not wear this fragrance, even if it comes in a spray bottle!
*** In the first line I made a typo "The tear was ..." How very appropriate!

i don't have any to share, but these are so so so funny. keep em' coming!

Some time ago I met my mother in law at a fancy event in Philadelphia -- she had taken the train down from New York. She was flustered and a bit bedraggled...and as we were walking into the hotel she said, "You don't have any perfume with you, do you?" So of course I reached into my evening bag and pulled out a spray vial. She promptly spritzed it right over her armpits and said, "I hope this gets rid of my body odor smell!"

Umm, the fragrance was Kingdom. She didn't exactly get rid of her problem!

Too funny!! I can't even imagine the smell!

Last year, wearing Prada bodylotion and EdP at a meeting of gardening-people, me representing one special type of flower. We where going to work together with people representing other interests... The meeting went very well. But when I came home from the meeting, my DH told me I smelled horrible! - I had put on too much of Prada... - I almost died when I realised how the others at the meeting must have smelled me...

I do love Prada, but I am careful with it from this very moment....

Last Friday...

I woke up with some heavy congestion and decided it would be best to try to chase it away with some aromatherapy. I put on some Rosemary Mint body lotion to help open up the air waves. I also applied cocoa butter to my belly (pregnant), and one small spritz of Kenzo Amour to each wrist. I popped a cough drop, and as I walked into work, my colleague asked, "Are you wearing Ben Gay?" in a disgusted tone. I said, "Uh... no... cough drop" wishing it really was the cough drop!

This one happens more often than I like to think about. I've been decanting the night before and then in the morning, head off to the post office before I get my shower in. (yes, my family is used to me smelling all weird).

Now, when I'm decanting, I often retry things or spritz them on to see how they layer with something else, or sometimes I just have the overwhelming urge to spritz one because I haven't worn it in a while. So I smell like Heinz 57 perfume or the inside of my sample box, essentially.

While I like that smell, when I head off to the post office when it first opens, usually I can just do a drop-off in the drop bins, but sometimes I have to go inside and stand in line. It's always in those moments that I remember that I reek of sample box. I mean, it's not one thing, sometimes it's 15. When the people ahead of me in line and the people behind me give me plenty of space, I'm so mortified, but I am NOT getting out of line.

What funniest is that this isn't just a one-time thing. I always seem to forget. It's like early morning before shower runs to the grocery store, etc., just fall into my senility area when it comes to how perfume reeky I am

Dropped an entire bottle of Azzaro on the floor (it fell from my locker, in junior high school) and the entire half of my school smelled like Azzaro for about a week. And everyone kept telling all of my classmates that it was me...

To this day, I cannot smell Azzaro without a slight feeling of shame coming over me. Talk about fragrance trauma.

Ack! I once did that with one of those huge bottles of soy sauce. The kitchen stank for months...

I did that once with a bottle of Hungarian plum eau de vie (szilva palinka, or slivovitz,as it is more commonly known). My landlord was not pleased. It stinks up the joint just opening the bottle.
On the perfume note, I used to wear tea rose oil in college, until someone said it smelled like the preying mantis she used to keep in a jar when she was a kid. Since then I've shied away from pure rose scents.

Man, this thread is hilarious!

One day I woke up craving a big powerful floral. It was unusually hot that day and I had to take a bus which is one of the worst way to commute, especially when temperatures are high.
A woman getting of the bus gave me this LOOK and said: "I really wish someone would ban those horrible florals that people wear!"

I wore Giorgio.

Rose oil smells like preying mantis'? Perhaps praying mantis' smell like rose?

Now that's an idea for a new line by Comme de Garcons. They could call it 'Series 8: Insects'

Preying Mantis
Black Widow Spider
Locust
Field Moth
Ladybug

Many years before, I spilt half a bottle of my mothers perfume on my hands ( I don't remember which, but it was really heavy!). I washed them, of course, many times, but... I had to go to my english lesson, just after this, and I was aware that the whole classroom could smell it...
I was terrified, because our teacher was famous for her anger outbursts. But since I was a quiet, shy girl, she could not imagine I was the guilty! She asked though twice a ( more naughty ) girl sitting behind me, if she was going to date Mr. Dracula later. The girl could not understand, but no one mentioned the perfume...

Oh boy...I remembered how in junior high school I not only wore PRIMO (the imposter for God-Awful Giorgio) very generously I might add but I had the matching PRIMO hairspray. This was back when the BIGGER THE HAIR the better! I went through a can of hairspray every other day .
Sweet Lord... I must've been one reeking 8th grader How shameful!!

When I was doing the second round of my degree exams, I wore Blv Notte (I took J'adore for the first round - nice, smooth, sensually fruity fragrance on me, stayed close to the skin and helped me relax on the seat of torture. But I was in need of something louder for the second round or what.). In the morning, I went there with my best friend and we entered an elevator. The door closed and a few seconds after that she clasped her nose and said:
"Do you smell that stench? It smells like chlorine. Must be reeking from the toilets in the ground floor, eeeew."
I didn't smell anything, so I nodded absently, yes, horrible, of course.
We made the exams, I went home, happy as a flea, and spritzed a good new load of Blv Notte - and then it hit me
(I didn't put it away.)

A friend once told me about her friend's colleague, who was selling those cheap fake scents. "If you like Miss Dior Chérie, you will like our fragrance n. 14" etc. To prove that those "fragrances" are just like the originals, only in plain bottles, she was also wearing them. The other colleagues were telling her it didn't smell like the originals, in fact, it did smell pretty bad, but she thought they just envy her. One cold April morning she took a fake Kenzo Jungle Elephant, but the day changed into a very hot one and in the afternoon, she ended up in a stuffy bus full of people. It looked like there's no more room, but after some time, she was standing alone in the middle of an empty circle, the people trying to get as far from her as they could. That finally made her get rid of the fake stuff and stop promoting it

Djuna,
Great idea! In any thread, the more anecdotes the better! My Delightful Shocking Cloud story, less funny than the others...

Inspired by folks here, I started wearing scents to bed. My wife, though not sharing my eclectic tastes, is tolerant of and sometimes enjoys my scents. One evening I had a new sample of Zino, which I quite liked. I applied it, and we went to bed, turning the light off.

Suddenly my wife started crying. In a state of panic, wondering if she was having a heart attack or something, I turned the light on and frantically asked what was the matter. Finally she managed to speak, and said that it gave her a flashback to her ex. Boy, did I feel like a jerk.

From then on, I've eliminated the scents to bed routine! Oh, and I've crossed Zino off my list forever!

great thread i cannot think of one for me but when i do i will post

The only thing funnier than reading this thread is reading it out loud to someone else and laughing as one speaks.

No perfume mishaps ... yet, but, just prior to walking into a meeting with what was about to become my most significant client at the time, I stepped in dog s#*t -- with no way or enough time to do anything about it. Well, it did give me an opening line when I shook the guy's hand.

I love to smell florals on others, but I have actually been asked not to wear them. When I was young, I loved them. I once cleared out a small store wearing Jungle Gardenia. I was at a meeting in my 20's wearing White Shoulders and the guy next to me said I smelled like his grandmother and he never liked her. At twelve, I wore Blue Waltz and finally found out why no one would come near me. When I was young, I may have over-sprayed, but I don't now out in public and I wore L'air du Temps a good classic, right. Wrong, not on me.

This one really cracked me up. Some bottles are way more stinky than others, too. I picture a particularly smelly bottle (unfortunately not proportionately tastier than average), and can almost smell it just thinking about it.


I like this idea.

LOL
I wore Bois Farine once to work. My coworker in the next cubicle kept telling me all day that "something smells like beer." Must have been the flour note in it!

So that explains why my boyfriend likes this so much!

It would have been better if he would have asked: "Is it you or me that smells like beer?" HA! I actually heard that from somebody else.

In middle school, I always took my Abercrombie and Fitch cologne (The original) to freshen up after gym. Well, I put it in my shorts pocket, then put that in my locker. When I pulled it out again, the bottle crashed into the concrete floor. I was running behind, so I was alone, but for the next week, my shoes just reeked of A&F.

That actually made me laugh about your woman's ex... Does that make me a bad person? If so, I think I'll laugh harder next time.
- Rich

Few years ago, in Italy, in women magazines there often were perfume samples
Well, a morning I went my newsdealer and in the shop there is a disgusting smell.

I: "Hi, Piero, brokes you some awful samples?"

It wasn't a sample, but a woman buying paperbooks

The only smelly broken bottle problem I have had (outside my own home) was dropping and shattering a bottle of insulin, large quantities of insulin smell miserable...skunks smell better. I was very unpopular.

I used to sell the plain-bottle copy-cats. I think I still have my copy of White Linen somewhere, and it's still pretty good. The company I worked for pioneered that business at the time, and their copies were really quite accurate (to my nose at the time anyway!). All the same...White Linen is a pretty potent smell at the best of times. The only thing wrong with the copies was they didn't have the same longevity. That was particularly noticeable with White Linen, because the 'real thing' lasts all day and beyond, whereas my copy had to be re-spritzed repeatedly. I guess it all goes back to the same old cliche: you get what you pay for. Or...buy cheap, buy twice!

I recall that some years back, in a time when I wore no scent other than whatever was incorporated into the bar of shower soap , I happened to meet an old friend in a retail store. We shook hands and from that moment until I could get to a public sink and attempt to remove whatever the foul artificial scent he had soaked his hand in and transferred to mine, I was broadcasting what I thought was the aroma funeral parlors use to mask the odor of decomposition. Ghastly, and damn near impossible to wash off I soon found out. The manufacturer had made some sort of attempt at a berry scent I think, but definitely a perverse Warp 9 on the scale of nastiness and persistence.

When I was yonger we found the fishtank with dead fish in it, and it smelled strange to say the least.

Finally figured out that my little sister thought it didn't smell that great, so she dumped a bottle of cheapo kids 'perfume' into the tank, for the fishies, so it would smell nice for them.

What was the opening line????

My best friend's younger sister filled up her potty with her mum's Chanel No.5...
Kids and perfume don't mix do they?

I'm usually extremely picky about the fragrances I select, but occasionally have been seduced by a bottle/name into thinking I like something far better than I actually do... which was how I acquired a bottle of Libertine.

I realised how wrong this fragrance was for me, when I was taking the downtown F, and, after about two stops was angrily wondering who the thoughtless beast was, who'd applied maraschino cherry juice with a crop duster. I noticed people moving to other parts of the car, leaving even, and tried to determine where I might move to myself, to escape this cloying scent.

As I shoved my hair back off my face for a better look around, I realised that I was the culprit. My skin really brings out sweetness in fragrances, and had turned this into something positively sinus swelling.

(This must smell lovely on SOMEone, so if there is anyone in the NYC area who's interested in a bottle of Libertine--minus about half a dozen squirts--let me know, and it's yours, no strings attached )

I think the only embarasssing moment I had was when I just replied Lolita Lempicka's L and then found out me and a group of people were travelling by car to a store and not walk. So in the car we go, after replying perfgume, with coats on. It got pretty warm and I really felt how heavy L was. I hope the others weren't too troubled but I don't see a way they couldn't have noticed.

Also one guy at work hates perfume, all perfume because he prefers natural scents. Good thing he works next to the guys who don't shower or change their clothes daily..so nice and natural.

My friend Lauren gave me a few bottles of cheap perfume. I sprayed a LOT on because I could not smell anything at all. I think I mixed them too (gimme a break, I was 14) Then I was sitting in economics class and we were in groups. This one obnoxious guy mentioned that it smelled like bathroom air freshener. I knew it was me he smelled! I felt so dumb for spraying so much. From then on I did use it as bathroom freshener!

ok now i have one. at my subway stop, you have to take an elevator to get down to the subway. this morning, some woman came rushing into the packed elevator and ran over my foot with a cart. after we got out of the elevator my boyfriend goes, "how'd you like getting your foot run over by a drunk woman?" and i said, "drunk woman?" and he goes, "yeah, she reeked of booze." and i was like, "oh, hmm." so we get on the subway and we're sitting there and he goes, "actually...i think that booze smell...might be your perfume...?" lol. so my perfume smells like a drunk person on the subway.

and the perfume? parfumerie generale tuberose couture.