Is it just ME?

Or is wearing strong perfume just selfish?

IS THERE anything more invasive than an overperfumed woman? Or, in some cases, man? By standing near you or leaning in for a kiss, this person makes your breath catch.

It pollutes your nose with floral extreme (funereal lilies, choking patchouli) plus violent notes of musk, civet or ambergris, harvested from the bottoms of deer, African wild cats or sperm whales.

Ideally, people smell of nothing unless you get close on purpose; but if I do, I prefer to detect sweat, meaning they’d done a bit of work, or wine implying they might be boozily amusing.

Lashing on scent implies they don’t care about anyone else’s airways.

Most people stick to lightish colognes, so meeting a serious user is startling. I am scarred by a childhood spent in Europe, where getting into a lift with a rich lady in furs could send you reeling backwards. But perfume-assault still sometimes happens.

One recent story brought on the shudders. From Pompeii to grisly burials, archaeologists dig up many horrors, and the latest is near Cairo: a jar with residue of a perfume Cleopatra would have worn.

Professors re-created ‘a smell no one has smelt for 2,000 years’. It was pungent, thick and sticky, based on myrrh, cardamom, cinnamon and olive oil.

The Cleopatras and Nefertitis, foreshadowing those lift ladies, wouldn’t just dab a bit on. And it stayed on for days. In Shakespeare’s Antony And Cleopatra, Enobarbus describes the queen’s barge with its ‘poop of beaten gold’ and purple sails ‘so perfumed that the winds were lovesick’.

It was a signal of power, wealth and dominance.

And so it is with today’s perfume-aggressors. The only consolation is hoping they attract wasps and get stung.

Lashing on extreme scent implies you don’t care about anyone else’s airways