The Odor of Memory
I had a smell pull me into the past last night. The current brochure features the new Avon Sand Art Lip Gloss. I purchased the demo, a small tapered bottle full of layered colors with an elongated metallic top. You spread the colors on your lips and the multiple shades combine to a unique finish.
Most of my customers bought this item. It's inexpensive, cute, and a nice gift for a daughter or young friend.
I finally opened the gloss for the first time last night before bed. The bottle is so pretty I didn't want to try it and mess up the layers of color until Campaign 10 was laid to rest. It smells like coconut! I had no idea!
It smells like the roll-on lip gloss I used as a teenager, a shimmery powder pink color that left my lips moist and sticky. Those were the days when my mind was filled with mischief and boys, the summer I got kicked out of Girl Scouts for setting up a side business outside my tent during camping week.
My best friend lined up boys from the Boy Scout camp across the stream, and we charged them a dollar each for a French kiss. We both lacquered up with our roll-on gloss and tossled our feathered hair. The coolness of the night air, the thought that we may get caught, the way Brian the Eagle Scout's lips and tongue felt against mine as he pressed his body close, was sheer heaven. I would have paid him the dollar.
Between the two of us we made fifty-three dollars before old Mrs. Knight rounded the corner on the way to the outhouse, her mouth falling open, cigarette dropping, at the sight of my friend hunched over to kiss a short scout and me stuffing another dollar in my offical green and white shirt. I don't want to remember the rest - the interrogation, the call to my parents, the long silent ride home in my dad's station wagon.
The power of lip gloss. Who knew?
6:16:10 AM 
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