For years I actually tried to emulate Miss Helen's heel clicking: ga-bum-click, ga-bum-click, but I couldn't pull it off without looking like Elaine Benes doing her "little kicks" dance. Her legendary perfume cloud, however, is something I've always tried to avoid, as I have distinct memories of other girls in my second grade class frowning and holding their noses and arguing that our good counselor should really be known as "Miss Smellin." Over-perfuming, I learned early enough, was a no-no: what smells good to you might be completely repulsive to the rest of the world.

Susan Carpenter of the LA Times touches on the legitimate health concerns that over-perfuming can bring up when one decides to pull a Miss Helen in an office setting, noting that allergy sufferers often have a tough time with overwhelming perfumes: "Their eyes water or their noses run when they breathe in various substances, whether it's dust, dander, pollen or perfumes, the last of which contain hundreds of different chemicals."

I'll admit that I'm a bit of a sucker for perfumes: I'm terrible at applying makeup and my nails are always bitten to the quick, so as far as easy beauty rituals go, spraying on some fancy perfume is right up my alley. Still, I try to keep my spritzes to a minimum, to avoid being "that perfume lady" who ruins everyone's life by stinking up the joint. I've walked by enough Abercrombie stores in my life to know how being on the other end of over-perfuming feels. I've also had to ditch a few beloved perfumes after my boyfriend found them a bit off-putting, as it's hard to spend a great deal of time with someone who loves you, but think you smell "a bit like a flower shop in the sewer."

However, there is something to say for owning your strong signature scent: my grandmother wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew for years and years (and when I say "wore," I mean "drenched herself in") and though I don't smell it very often anymore, occasionally I'll be in a store or on the subway with another woman who apparently loved it as much as my grandmother did, and the smell causes my eyes to water a bit, due to both allergies and memories. I guess the most appropriate thing to do, in consideration for others, is to learn to wear a strong scent without going overboard, or perhaps leaving the perfume behind when you go into the office. Or you could just be like Miss Helen, slip on your highest pair of heels, and work it for all it's worth, no matter what anybody says.

How do you deal with over-perfumers? And do you play it safe with your own signature scents?

When Perfume Becomes A Nuisance (Or A Health Issue) [LATimes]

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]

That review is poetic, but the one for Lalique's Le Perfum is more direct: ("Vile, cheap, obnoxiously chemical... I hope to live long enough to see this sort of faceless dreck wiped off the face of the earth. Nice bottle.") Some of the reviews get straight to the point ("The bathrooms in hell smell like this.") and others invoke vivid imagery ("a shrill little floral that feels like music heard through someone else's headphones") but one in particular caught Lewis' eye: It's for a perfume called Sacrebleu:

"If you travel at night on Europe's railways, near big stations you can sometimes see lights the size a teacup nestled between the rails, shining the deepest mystical blue-purple light through a filthy Fresnel glass. They appear to be permanently on, suggesting that the message they convey the train driver is an eternal truth. Since childhood I have fancied the notion that it may not be a trivial one like 'Buffers ahead' but something numinous and unrelated to duty, perhaps 'Life is beautiful' or some such. Sacrebleu has the exact feel of those lights, a low hum that may be eclipsed by diurnal clamor but rules supreme when, at 3 a.m., you know you're looking into your true love's eyes even though you can't see them."

The Sweet Smell of Success [Slate]