30 Demeters in 30 Days: Day 28, Baby Powder

Demeter Baby Powder smells like baby powder, of course.

And yet...it doesn't, exactly. If you smell baby powder, then you know you're smelling baby powder; it's very distinctive. If you smell Demeter Baby Powder, you might think of baby powder, but you are also going to think of a number of other things.

Baby Powder is a floral scent dominated by rose and vanilla, and the first thing it made me think of is FlowerByKenzo. Since, as I wrote, that scent reminded me very much of Johnson's Baby Powder, that means that Demeter Baby Powder does smell somewhat like its namesake. But it also smells like lots of rose-vanilla florals; it calls to mind Tocade by Rochas, Jean-Paul Gaultier Classique, Versace's Baby Rose Jeans, Givenchy's L'Interdit, Ombre Rose by Brossard, and no doubt quite a few others, because the rose-vanilla accord is not a new idea in perfumery. (Guerlain's Nahema is also a rose-vanilla floral, and I've never smelled it, but I bet there are elements of it in Baby Powder too.) And, of course, it smells like Love's Baby Soft, which my sisters wore in the seventies--everybody's sisters wore it in the seventies, I think--and which was meant to smell like a slightly grown up, slightly sexed up version of clean, soft powder.

In fairly short order (since we generally associate Demeters and brevity), maybe fifteen minutes, the stronger floral notes dim and wink out; what's left really is the powder-soft smell of perfumed talc and nothing but.

The lessons here are that things are not always what they appear, and that patience is a virtue, particularly if you want to smell like a freshly powdered baby.