Guerlain Shalimar

“I've told versions of this story on reddit over the years so I swear I'm not a bot, I am the authentic "wore Shalimar to jail" girl: My late teens and early twenties were the definition of a cautionary tale, but I got lucky at the final hour and was able to clean up my act with only moderate damage. I'm a very different person now, but I raised a lot of hell when I was young. After I got clean I wore Shalimar as a daily driver during what was arguably one of the most peaceful times in my life. Unfortunately I still had to pay off some of the debts I incurred during my dumbass era and that eventually involved turning myself in to get rid of my warrant for walking off probation years before. Now, I was naive enough to think that because I'd legitimately turned my life around, been doing volunteer work, all the right things, that even with priors I would just be ordered to attend classes and pay a fine. But what ended up happening was I served ten days out of my ninety beginning immediately. So I was all made up pretty as a picture and instead of going to lunch with my dad afterwards, I went directly to jail. If you've never been (and I can't say I recommend it, though between jail and psych I'd choose jail) there are a few funny things that happen when you're incarcerated. One of these things is that you and everyone around you achieve this nearly zenlike state of boredom. *Everything* mundane that isn't just sitting around becomes exciting, even sweeping the floor. Another is that you revert to this high school mentality of making fast best friends, because since there's nothing to do but talk you end up hearing everyone's life story in short order and getting paper for passing notes or doodling is *the shit*. The strangest and most relevant to the funny part (it's coming I promise) though is that everything and everyone start to smell the same. All of your personal products are the same, because they all come from commissary. All of the blankets and clothes are washed in the same industrial laundry. Everyone is eating the same food. It's very odd and slightly maddening if you're a scent driven person. Pretty much the only personal belonging you keep is your underwear, and your bra if it doesn't have an underwire. I prefer sports bras or no bras, so I got to keep my bra... And the dirty little secret that while it wasn't exactly funky it had been worn a few times, and each time with Shalimar. I was using the EDT at the time and what I didn't realize until then was that when you remove every other source of olfactory stimulation, several day's worth of drydown from even just the EDT built up on fabric is definitely noticeable. I started to get this light whiff of almost a spiced almond vanilla pudding, and while we were flopped in our boats just doing nothing I casually mentioned to my cellmate that my bra was the only thing on the whole block that smelled good. So she came over and invited herself to smell my boobs and then dragged me out to the common room to tell everyone else to smell my boobs. For the rest of the day and into the next couple I had random chicks coming over like "Can I get a hit of that?" and sticking their nose into my nonexistent cleavage, then exclaiming that it still smelled good. The male guard was like "Knock that shit off, ladies" at the bizarre pack of wild dogs act but the female guard was entertained as hell by the whole thing and gave us a piece of paper to tear up so I could write down the name. There are probably still scraps of paper floating around metro Detroit with Wayne County on one side and "Guerlain—Shalimar—EDT" in my chicken scratch on the other lmfao. As a note I've attempted to recreate this by spraying it directly into my bra daily and wearing it right to the edge of "Ew wash that thing" and I've never been able to get it to hit as noticeably as that again. It really was a phenomenon born out of the homogeneous scent-deprived nature of the setting. But it's still by far my favorite goofy jail story. Tl;dr: Did not pass go, went directly to jail, became an olfactory prison bitch (thanks, Mariah)”