Perfume queen: Don’t spray scent on – use a paint brush
MOST of us only have time for a quick spritz of perfume as we’re getting dressed in the morning.
But women should apply their scent with a paintbrush rather than spray it if they want the best results, according to one of the world’s leading perfumers.
Jo Malone said brushing the body with fragrance allows different scents to be placed on different parts of the body like a painter applying different colours to a canvas – allowing the wearer to ‘become the artist’. Speaking at the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature yesterday, the 53-year-old said: ‘If you were a bride you might take some fresh orange blossom and dot yourself as though with confetti.
‘It’s looking at fragrance as becoming the artist and picking up the paintbrush and painting yourself with fragrance, which is a paradigm shift.’
The mother of one said her husband of 32 years, former surveyor Gary Wilcox, once told her ‘once in your lifetime you should change the way the world wears fragrance’. So she has suggested women paint their entire bodies with different scents.
Demonstrating her plan, she wiped a paintbrush over reporter Bryony Gordon’s neck saying: ‘If you were to stand in your underwear you just literally take the fragrance all over your body.
‘And what the paintbrush does is it dries all the alcohol really, really quickly and then you can take another fragrance and then different parts of your body.’
Miss Malone grew up in a council house in Kent and left school at 13 to care for her mother, who had had a stroke. She founded her brand Jo Malone London in 1983 and made millions when she sold it to Estée Lauder in 1999. She has now set up a new collection of perfumes, candles and bath creams called Jo Loves.
Her success may be partly down to the fact she has synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which the senses overlap, meaning she interprets sound and colour as smell.
She lost her sense of smell while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2003. But Miss Malone, who is now in remission, said it has since come back ‘stronger than ever’.