Nothing funny about feldspar

When did hair styling (and other personal) products start smelling so bad? I mean, I never was a fan of the flowers and lavender and vanilla, but lately the stuff all seems to smell like medicine.

My hair is getting a bit long and unruly, so I tried to control it by using some sort of “style paste” Plagioclase had which looks and smells like car wax. He doesn’t use it, preferring some sort of glue-like product that looks for all the world like Elmer’s. Being the buyer of the ill-regarded paste, I figured I’d use it, except it made my hair look like I had badly buffed the wax in my hair. (All the time I’m writing this, I can’t get the “I’m a Dapper Dan man!” line out of my head.)

I happened to get a small bottle of hair spray from a salon prior to the wedding (a plan for Plagioclase’s Mother to have her hair done turned into a styling session for me), and started using it, and boy does it ever smell like something you wouldn’t want to smell. I mean, it doesn’t smell like rotting meat, it just smells like somebody took all the herbs one would use to cover up the smell of rotting meat to make this stuff.

And it’s not just this spray. The hotel had some chichi “products” that made me long for a good strawberry scented candle to counteract them (in case you don’t get the irony of that statement, I can’t abide scented candles). Is this the latest trend? Everyone is so insensitive to sweet-smelling gunk that P&G and its ilk are trying to stand out by smelling like some 19th century Patent Medicine? Or perhaps the opposite — everyone is now “allergic” to strong scents, so these “natural herbals” must be better for us?

I need to find some essential oils, pronto, and doctor this stuff up. It was too spendy to throw away.