What's your aromatic palette this week? Or does the surge in perfume interest make scents?

So, if I may be so bold as to ask, what’s your aromatic palette of self-expression?

I only ask because an entire movement has occurred without my knowledge, which in and of itself is no big news, but it involves the perfume industry, which I’d assumed had gone the way of the cassette tapes and manual transmissions.

I thought fragrances were only used in the modern world by teenage boys and United Fight Club managers. Every now and then, yes, you would get a gust of someone who had sloshed on the Old Spice in quantities normally associated with dousing a campfire. But it was not a pleasant experience, and you would instinctively step away from this invasion of your personal olfactory space — as would everybody else in the checkout aisle.

Often as not it would be some 6-foot-6, 300-pound bald guy with a goatee in a sleeveless T-shirt and swimming trunks, a look whose incongruity with the scent of violets and cinnamon sticks is impossible to overstate. But no one’s going to tell him ix-nay on the aqua-yay elvet-yay because he’s 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds.

So imagine my surprise at a Washington Post story about the post-pandemic surge in high-end fragrances, where “powerhouses such as Coty and L’Oréal are seeing a surge as consumers retreat from the notion of having a ‘signature scent’ and treat aroma as a barometer of their moods.”

Granted, I do live far from civilization among an environmentally oriented population that ostracizes anything unnatural, and you will not get so much as a whiff of Chanel, even at the Garden Club’s annual fundraising gala.

(This sun-splashed crowd, which is heavily into every every preventive behavior that will extend their lives by an extra 10 minutes, was rocked by the news last month that sunscreen is a direct delivery system of forever chemicals into the bloodstream. Many of them are re-evaluating their lives up to this point as we speak.)

But in the cities where these trends are incubated, people came charging out of the pandemic flush with cash and in desperate, oxygen-like need for self expression. Good to know those government sustenance checks were going for a $300, 2.4-ounce bottle of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540.

“Plus,” the Post says, “people wanted to ‘smell like a rich person,’ said Dominica Baird, chair of the business of beauty and fragrance program at Savannah College of Art and Design. You feel like ‘you’re in a club’ when someone compliments your fragrance, she said.”

If you say so. But laying out all this coin on today’s perfumes can make you a poor person in short order. Sounding like those consumer-segment commentators who tell you that you can stretch your food budget by freezing leftover chicken bones for stock, fragrance analysts insist it is possible to elbow your way into a status-elevating scent for “only” $100 to $200 a bottle.

Except that to fit in, one scent will not do. “It used to be that a spritz of fragrance was singular to the wearer, a medley of notes both distinct and familiar,” the Post writes. Now, “consumers are retreating from the notion of having a 'signature scent' and treating aroma as a barometer of their moods.”

Uh-oh. If she comes into the office wearing Eau de Putin, it might be a good time to use up some of that sick leave.

I don’t know. I guess I wore what you would call a signature scent back in the ’90s, when it was the thing to do. But I never woke up thinking, “I feel like watermelon today,” nor did I treat new scents with the excitement of a Bedouin greeting a spice-bearing camel just returned from the Far East.

Today, if my aromatic palette stays anywhere on this side of goat bedding, I call it a win.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Post reports a post-pandemic surge in perfume sales