Perfume Blotters and Spring Cleaning

Lately, as soon as I walk through the door of my apartment, I am immediately hit by a harmonious and sometimes cacophonous cloud of perfumes. Their conduit: BLOTTERS. 

Strange things happen to these blotters when they sit and stew together.  

If you don't know, blotters are bits of paper that we dunk into perfume to drink up the juice so that we may lean back and leisurely try to capture all that we are smelling. They save the skin, so to speak. 

Blotters have long necks with either pointed or flat heads. The ones with pointed heads tend to have wider bodies. The ones with flat heads tend to have skinnier bodies. 

These blotters have found a home on my desk stuffed in glass jars, in my pockets, my purse, at work, and even holding my favorite pages in my books. Looking at the jar on my desk, I can see many labeled blotters each holding a different fragrance name, Youth Dew; Beyond Paradise followed by these three words in parenthesis, (a green floral); Mitsouku is almost pushing its beautiful self up and out of the jar. I pull Cassis out and I remember how it stained the blotter and then slowly transformed from astringent berry to the faint smell of cat pee. There are more. Prada Man, it kept getting better and better as it reached its dry down. Hexenol-3-Cis smells like freshly cut grass. I pull another, it's Paris,  faded yet still so poetic and floral, and Coco, a classic chypre. The volatile ones like lavender and bergamot have all gone away only the smell of paper remains. 

Guess it's time to toss them out properly.