NOVEMBER
Typically, November is a refreshing time for you, Virgo, as it’s the part of the year when the rest of the world begins to crave the indoors and solitude as much as you naturally do panseasonally. Instead of devoting your time to finding a new job (yes, sorry, forgot to mention—you no longer have a job), you’ll fixate the bulk of your diminished attention towards the acquisition of a perfume that feels like you.
You’ve been threatening to explore the wily and sensuous world of perfume for awhile, but have been too intimidated to take the first step. Thankfully, the barren landscape of unemployment provides you with ample time to fixate on your fictional notion that smelling good will solve all of your problems.
I don’t agree with your core belief that a job will fall out of midair as soon as you find a scent that compliments your bizarre combination of personality traits and wholly imagined sexual appeal, but there are a few ways I can see your life improving once perfume enters the equation. Most obviously, you could become more tolerable company. You are an exceptionally sweaty person who almost exclusively wears ancient clothing that, based on all available evidence, was once owned by another excessively sweaty individual, so you aren’t someone who is often accused of appearing/smelling too clean. This is to say that smelling better would improve the lives of many who endure your odorous companionship, Virgo.
Your Mother is scent sensitive, and can get horrible migraines from perfumes. As such, your childhood home was primarily a scent-free zone, though much like a teenager hiding pornography, so too were you secretly rubbing Clinique Happy samples onto your wrists from Teen Vogue and hoping your dirty deeds would go unnoticed.
Perhaps because of the clandestine nature of perfume in your childhood home, you became fascinated by scents from an early age. You’d lay traps for the boys you went to school with, so they’d move in such a way that you’d be able to sneak a sniff of their irresistible scents of Old Spice deodorant or Axe body spray. On the school bus you’d say something like, Oh gosh, if only I could open this window it’s sooo heavy and as soon as they’d reach up to open the window on your behalf your pervert nose would dart towards their vulnerable torsos so you could catch a delicious whiff of their powerful smells.
In a vacuum, this may seem like a fairly overt way to alleviate your youthful fascination of the changing bodies and smells of your peers, but during one particularly flagrant episode of your adolescence you literally just asked every boy at school how big their penis was, so by comparison, it was sort of innocent when you still had the decency to gain your intel via booby trap.
In the beginning of your post-job scent search, you’re on the hunt for a perfume that showcases who you are. However, it won’t take long for you to realize that such a scent would be deeply depressing (it would smell like a rotting coconut from Survivor and the embittered reek that comes from not understanding SEO but pretending to), so you shift your search to an aspirational perfume instead of an autobiographical one.
To help you in your journey, your friend Sally surprises you with an array of perfume samples. These sumptuous miniatures aren’t the cloak and dagger perfumed paper advertisements of your youth. As you gaze at the tiny bottles lined up in their stylish pink box like soldiers at attention, you imagine that somewhere in the ranks lies the perfume sample that will, at last, impressively misrepresent your level of confidence, sophistication, and sexual generosity.
A friend will try and guide you through your first experimental spritz. She’s the same friend who first walked you through using face powder, and this time you’re hoping to appear more impressive than you were sixteen years prior when you basically threw a quarter cup of Covergirl onto your face and she had to be like, Okay, next time I would go a little lighter.
To show you’ve grown, you will demonstrate your command of the highly coveted adult value of restraint. You’ll press once, lightly, and aim the perfume at your left wrist. Though you love the emerging scent, despite your soft touch, you immediately worry you’ve sprayed an inappropriate amount of fragrance and head to the sink to wash your wrist.
Across the days and weeks that follow, you’ll dole out what you view as the teeniest possible portion of perfume, only to feel desperately insecure all day and perform the role of a considerate person and over-apologize for any potential scent related imposition.
You experiment with the application. You’ll squeeze a mere whisper of perfume towards the ceiling, wait a moment or two, then slide through the lingering airborne detritus, hoping to get just the faintest memory of scent. You find yourself panicked that your strong scent could be the foil to someone’s perfect evening, the source of a painful anecdote about the subway, or a high octane ghost haunting a friend long after you’ve left their company. No strategy will yield the results you feel you deserve, which is to feel daily stalwart confidence that every living person is happy for you about your perfume and not mad at all about the amount you’re wearing.
After many failed coming out parties for the new sensuous you, it dawns on you that each and every perfume you've tried actually has brought out the inner you. An overly apologetic, embarrassed, anxious woman interrupting everyone’s conversation to apologize for being alive/perceivable. You will spend the remainder of the month hoping to become calloused towards the potential effect of your smell on those around you (where was that compulsory empathy when you were showering every three days in college????), but the nirvana of self-possession continues to evade you.
As is surely clear by every single one of your personality traits, no time soon will you grow out of feeling total panic about the way you imagine your perfume is being received. The good news is that the degree of offensiveness of cypress, black pepper, and cedarwood are considerably less fatal than that of the rancid clothes from prior centuries you proudly wear without apology. Don’t you see, Virgo? Your ease already exists, it’s just more plainly available to you in self-forgiveness towards accidentally smelling like a ferris wheel sized mothball than it is smelling like anything beautiful or on purpose.
I suggest you play the hand you’re dealt and simply accept that for you, life is choosing between smelling great but feeling guilty or smelling terrible and feeling nonplussed. There’s an O. Henry story in there somewhere, Virgo.