Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant to be a kind space, so please try not to give or take offense, and let’s all agree to disagree when opinions differ. In fragrance as in life, your mileage may vary! YMMV.

Today is Friday, July 7, and I made sure to post on time today! What’s on my mind this week is fragrance of a different sort — our 11 year-old dog Lucy had not one, but two accidents in the house this week. We think it’s because of several recent thunderstorms, which made her reluctant to go outside. Usually she’s very good about sitting at the back door to ask to go out, but she’s scared of thunder and 1) didn’t want to go out; and 2) couldn’t hold it in. (That’s my theory, anyway. If it happens again soon, without thunder, we’ll take her to the vet). So here’s the fragrance issue: once a dog has peed somewhere, the odor will lead them to pee there again. Given that Lucy peed on our most expensive rug and on our son’s bed (!), it was imperative to get all traces of the pee out, even after cleaning enough that we couldn’t see or smell it any more. Dogs can.

Enzymes to the rescue! There are many rug cleaning products that use enzymes to break down urine molecules that are undetectable to us, but not to dogs. I used those thoroughly on everything I couldn’t launder, and they worked! How do I know? I bought a small flashlight-type device that emits black light, which shows dried pee stains as glowing spots in a dark room. No more glow spots on the rug or bedding! And now we come to the more pleasant fragrance issue: we’ve succeeded in the past helping Lucy through thunderstorms by putting a snug doggie sweater on her, but since dogs can sense thunder long before we can, we haven’t always been able to do that in time. So I’ve bought a diffuser that emits a vet-recommended synthetic pheromone; it mimics the scent of a mother dog and is supposed to calm adult dogs as well as puppies. To humans, it is odorless. We’ve just put it by her crate and I hope it helps. I hope it also helps retrain her to stay in her crate overnight without fussing — she had been doing that for years until 2020, when our kids all moved home and started letting her sleep on their beds.

Speaking of pheromones, I remember loving Marilyn Miglin’s fragrance of that name in the 1980s, and wearing it often. It was a green floral chypre (turns out I am very consistent over time in the kinds of fragrance I like). Apparently the current version isn’t nearly as good, not surprising given that the original was loaded with oakmoss at 1978 levels.

Do you have any thoughts on pheromones generally, or on that fragrance? Any words of wisdom for us in helping Lucy?