It's the brain-child of Michelle Roark, the 2009 U.S. freestyle skiing champion (who, yes, also studies chemical engineering) who credits some of her success to a custom scent, yes, Confidence. ("Ego" was apparently already taken by the hundreds of celeb unguents flooding the agora.) She's also concocted Focus, Balance, Adventure, and Imagination. And while this may all seem more "snake" than "essential" oily, she's a true believer, telling the Wall Street Journal, "It's not just mumbo-jumbo...There is a science behind it."

You don't need to have studied Stanislavsky to know about scent memory, and scents like Roark's work on the same principle. As the WSJ explains,"scientific studies have shown that smell and emotion exist in the same network of neural structures known as the limbic system-an ancient core of the brain that dates to the beginning of human evolution." Otherwise known, yes, as "aromatherapy." And the problem, as killjoy scientists are quick to point out, is that everyone's associations are different: if a horrible relative always had grapefruit breath, that's not going to spell "energizing" as much as "nausea." I like the smell of Lysol disinfectant because it reminds me of my grandma, but I'm guessing this isn't a winning formula for "Comfort."

So, yeah, chances are Confidence's success is down to placebo effect. But so what? That's real, too. And it's always unwise, it seems, to overestimate the skepticism of the buying public. We want to believe! And a vial of perfume is a lot safer - and cheaper - than a vial of Beta-blockers. And clearly the manufacturer has faith in her product, which is a lot more than you can say for most snake-oil salesmen. The danger, of course, is in attempting freestyle skiing under the influence.

Can Perfume Make You a Winner? [Wall Street Journal]

I mean, I get changing your scent by season: there are, after all, some issues of evaporation, and light florals can be incongruous on a wool coat. But I'd always understood from a lifetime of casual fashion mag reading that people were basically attracted to one scent family or the other - floral, woodsy, grassy etc. Yes, there was that period in middle school when everyone wore Gap scents - and later Clinique Happy - but I'd always thought one of the lesser pleasures of adulthood was discovering a closer olfactory match to one's personality and sticking to it.

According to the Los Angeles Times,"these aren't light-and-fruity times. You can smell the gravitas in the air — and on the wrists of stylish women all over. Serene florals and cheery citrus fragrances in the family of Prescriptives Calyx and Issey Miyake L'Eau d'Issey, which have been en mode since the 1990s, are giving way to headier scents." The new-old ones are heavy on the musk and amber - which, apparently, denote either gravitas or evoke 80's excess. I don't know who these women are whose finger is so on the societal pulse that they feel a compulsion to run out and douse themselves in Shalimar a la Katherine Parker in Working Girl and throw out their frivolous old perfumes. (For my part, I choose to, ahem, increase societal stability by sticking to my usual - Frederic Malle's En Passant (for business situations and meeting parents) or the slightly sultrier Lys Mediteranee.)

I mean, people can obviously wear whatever perfume they want — even if I'm kind of baffled by the woman who says, "I'll suffer through the first two hours of a perfume being overbearing because I want it to last all day," — but I'm kind of sick of hearing lately about how we're theoretically being pushed and pulled in all directions by the cosmos. Yes, the economy is beyond our control, and is indeed effecting most spheres of our lives. But it has not stripped us of individual tastes and opinions and preferences. No magic hand is altering our skirt length while we sleep or forcing men with curvaceous girlfriends into the arms of the more muscular ideal to which they allegedly cleave in times of economic stress. There is enough out of our hands right now without some sinister force also spraying Opium on our wrists.

New Fragrances Catch The Scent Of Classics From Decades Past [LA Times]

Vulva Original [Vulva]