My husband and I are going out for dinner tonight. I don’t have many pheros left (still waiting on receipt of two orders that were shipped at the end of April - gaah!) but I do have half a bottle of Essence of Woman, so I was putting that on. I was already wearing MMU’s Pink Clouds, and have a little bottle of EoW pre-mixed with Pink Clouds, but I was putting on a few straight drops first before applying the perfume oil.
I get dressed in a room that is probably eight feet by ten feet in diameter. I had just put on seven or eight drops of EoW - and my husband walked in. I panicked! I put down the dropper bottle of EoW and “casually” picked up a lipstick, like I was just doing my makeup normally. But he didn’t react at all. He picked up his jeans from the chest behind me, and walked straight out again.
How can any person with a functioning nose not react to the scent of eight drops of EoW straight from the bottle?!
That must be it. Maybe he just thought it was a particularly strong perfume…sometimes, with some batches of EoW (from what I am told; I’ve only smelled one bottle) it doesn’t smell all that bad straight out of the bottle.
Wow. Lucky you! I carry a bottle in my purse at all times, and a friend smelled it and said “God, that smells like cheese and rancid vagina!”
I’ve never been caught putting it on, but I’ve been caught right after, during dry-down time. Luckily I had a bag of smartfood on hand, and since my punk hates dairy products and is not too familiar with them, he assumed it was my “cheese popcorn” that smelled like cheese.
Update: we came back after dinner (a very cranky affair - he was displeased with pretty much everything) and he walked back into the same room and immediately asked me, “What smells like bong water?!”. He picked up on something alright, but only when he came back into the room later…
I was wearing TAL, Instant Honesty, Instant Shine (my last couple of sprays of the last two), and EoW. The night was not a good one, and I don’t know what to blame, but my husband was cranky all night and kept arguing with me and picking fights. I wonder was it the TAL - it does nothing for me but I haven’t worn it around him before, and crankiness is really out of character for him. Hmmm.
He may not have responded when he saw you “putting on your lipstick” because (forget technical psychological term) what you were doing was an activity in his mind already associated with you. Ergo, the smell was extra stimuli that had no place in this schema. Now, when he entered the room again, it was empty, and it “smelled like bong water,” he was able to notice because the normal schema for the empty room is for it to not smell like bong water. Pretty amazing the information our brains ignore. I hope there is someone here who remembers the term for this psychological phenomenon.
You know… I’m reminded of what Lor said in another thread. That the testosterone spike eow prompts can cause three reactions in men - one of which (if i remember correctly) was that if a man is already feeling a bit irritated he will become more irritated when he processes the testosterone spike.
If so, then if he was a bit grumpy to begin with, he will may well have become much grumpier.
Hope this makes sense, Lor put it much better than I did - it’s in the is my bf immune to cops thread I think..
Strong woman (TAL) smelling of rancid cheese farts and vomit (EOW) asks for husband’s honest emotions (Instant Honesty) to shine through… sounds like a combo for crankiness to me!
That sounds familiar. Somewhere in here, someone said that their man liked TAL and hated TAH, and another male friend of hers like TAH and not TAL. Could she have a TAH man? :o
I’m getting the idea that the recent batches of EoW aren’t what they used to be. I’ve been in a similar situation with too-freshly applied EoW (like 2 drops, 5 minutes out) and my husband immediately complained about the bad smell when I got within a few feet of him. Then I hear about people getting their first bottles and thinking the smell isn’t so bad … my bottle is over 2 years old now and it’s still lethal, though mellowed quite a bit since it was new.
I can’t claim to have a psychological term that fits this case like a glove, but I would say that the dynamic operating was “cognitive dissonance reduction”:
When you were present, putting on lipstick, his relationship to you dominated the information about the odor in the room. He may have smelled and unconsciously filed away the smell – and even been mulling over the reason for that smell all night long – but his conscious cognition just jettisoned the bongwater information because it wasn’t consistent with your activity (dissonance reduction.)
But when you were not present, and he’d been primed earlier to notice the odor, then he was comfortable raising the bongwater information to consciousness.
Is there someone else in your household that might have been “bonging” in your dressing room? …
Fantastic observations, everybody! I could use up my rep points for the 24 hour period on this thread, alone.
Flipcat, EoW doesn’t smell like that after it’s dried down and covered.
Anyway, I would also blame the TAL first, because even if he didn’t feel threatened, he might have still been annoyed by the powerful feeling he was getting from you. I was going to say if it’s not that it might be the IH bringing some unpleasant stuff to the surface–plus, some people always get a gloomy vibe from it.
However, May made a great point about the testosterone spike from the EoW and that Lor says it’s sometimes negative.
Carrie, I’ll let you all know when I open my second bottle. I ordered one immediately after spilling some of my original bottle, so I have one from February I still haven’t opened. My former TG unexpectedly took up with another girl in early March, so I was using much less of it, hence the second bottle remaining unused. If it smells stronger, I’ll weigh in.
Basically, I think it was the TAL, but the IH made him unable to cover his discomfort, and the EoW may have turned it into aggression.
Somewhere in here, someone said that their man liked TAL and hated TAH, and another male friend of hers like TAH and not TAL. Could she have a TAH man? :o