I love my feminine side. It goes without saying that it comes with a kind of performance. Performing being a divine female with style, and color, and texture, and smell. I’m unapologetic about my love of beautiful shoes, clothes, perfumes and the transformational power of makeup. These are things that give me the tools as a female to express myself and most often than not, literally lift up my mood. I have surely had moments when I was feeling down and putting on makeup and spritz of perfume transformed not just my outside look and my inside feelings.
Smell is especially powerful for helping me enjoy the present but also take me to other places and other times with memory and nostalgia. I can get transported to different lands and different stages in my life just on a whiff of a specific smell. The smell of apples to my childhood in Strasbourg, the smell of the earth after the first rains to my girlhood in Chilanga, the perfume Chanel No. 5 to my early 20s and college years in Lusaka, Cruel Gardenia Guerlain to the glamour and glitz of New York City, Prada Infusion D’Iris to happy days in Berkeley.
I’m grateful for these gifts of femininity and enjoy utilizing them and I hope you do too!