Sep 25, 2014 3 min read

Something caught my eye – or nose – at the department store last week: rows and rows of pretty, clear bottles of fragrance aligned perfectly on mirrored shelves. I have a few of this brand’s colognes, and so I stopped to see what’s new.

“That’s sage and sea salt,” said a salesman, approaching me as I picked up a bottle and tried to sniff the spray nozzle.

“Here, do it this way,” he said, spritzing a bit on the end of a little paper stick. He waved it a few times and then put it under my nose.

“Nice,” I said.

“Here’s blackberry and bay,” he said, handing me another paper stick.

We went on like that long enough that I put my purse and a shopping bag on the floor so I could get comfortable and indulge my nose for a while. This company, Jo Malone, has dozens of scents, and the salesman was intent of having me smell all of them. Nectarine, Lavender, Peony.

“Try orange blossom,” he said. “This is the one Princess Kate Middleton always wears.”

It was a little too sweet.

“Is your nose getting confused?” he asked, and it was. After about the fifth one, they all started to smell the same to me.

He handed me a little shot glass full of coffee beans, a kind of palate cleanser for the nose. Apparently, something about the acrid smell of coffee resets the olfactory switch.

And so, we continued like that, with the salesman offering me a scent like white jasmine and mint or wild bluebell. Each time, I would smell the paper stick and then pause in between for a coffee break.

After something like the 12th scent, I reached for the coffee bean glass, put it under my nose, inhaled and promptly snorted a bean into my right nostril.

So there I was in a fancy schmancy department store, with the store’s dang head of the whole fragrance department looking right at my nose, and my nostril now contained what looked like (sorry), a chocolate booger.

Before I could reach up to cover my nose and try to retrieve the bean, I inadvertently exhaled, launching the bean in a beeline headed right for the salesman’s chin. It landed on his necktie.

“Excuse me,” I said, mortified. He acted like he didn’t notice, dear sweet man. I wondered if this kind of thing happens to customers all the time, although never, ever to Princess Kate. They really ought to glue those beans to the glass or something. Or instead of coffee beans, offer a cup of brewed coffee to smell and sip, which I probably would have spilled on him because that’s how I am.

Anyway, I wasn’t looking to buy a new perfume that day, but after the horror of the bean snort, I was too embarrassed to reject that nice salesman.

I bought a small bottle of the blackberry and bay cologne. To tell you the truth, it smells like coffee to me.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.