If one wears BPAL scents, people who know you can't go into a department store, go to the fragrance counter, pick up the tester bottle of the fragrance you wear, spritz it on a card and walk around sniffing it, thinking about how it smells like you. There is a certain allure to this, assuming it's the right sort of person doing the sniffing. But let us not weep, for look at it this way -- because they can't go to the department store to sniff your fragrance, they have to come find you.

This thought crossed my mind because a guy I work with was patiently trodding around the mall with his wife over the weekend when she decided to sniff all the fragrances at the perfume counter. It gave him a headache and made him vaguely dizzy. He said he realized that they all smelled alike after a while, but nothing smelled anything like the perfumes that I wear.

I told him that his reaction was akin to people buying produce at a Farmer's Market and saying: "Wow, this tastes so much better!" Well yeah, the more natural the product, the more your senses are going to like it.

I have to wonder if the overconsumption of synthetic smells, tastes and textures starts to blunt the senses. And damn it, I am all about our senses! If we forget how to pay attention to them, we start to disassociate from our bodies and then what kind of fun are we having? Not as much.

I used to teach yoga every now and then, and the hardest thing for me was to try to get through to the people who are so disassociated from their physical selves. Sometimes the sense of dropping into their physical senses would cause them to feel anxious, nervous, frightened or terribly vulnerable. They either went into the feeling and worked with it, or they'd just shut down and stop coming to class.

So I think everyone who wears BPAL does a favor to society because we, at least for a few moments, make people drop back into their sense of smell when they get a whiff of something real.

The last statement is a great rationalization to more more oils from the Lab. Feel free to use it to pad your next order. Consider it your humanitarian work: "I must re-teach people how to smell." It's a tough job, but we're up to it.