US: Getting Past the You and Me Relationship & How Fragrance Works

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Mike Carruthers
Then is it really possible to be in a long term relationship and always be happy? I just did a piece for the New York Times on what I call normal marital hatred. It's okay to cross from harmony through disharmony into repair, but you have to know how. Plus, the best way to cool down a car that's been sitting in the hot summer sun. And what you may not know about the fascinating history of fragrances and perfumes.

Elise Pearlstine
Different perfumes smell different on different people. Some people can wear florals and they smell great. And on some people they turn kind of sour. When you do wear especially a very good perfume, it blends with your skin and it becomes a little bit more you. All this today on something you should know.

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Mike Carruthers
Now, something you should know fascinating intel. The world's top experts, and practical advice. You can use in your life today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers hi. Welcome to something you should know. You know, nothing puts a damper on a car trip than when somebody says, I don't feel good, I'm gonna throw up.

I don't feel good at all. If anyone in your family is prone to car sickness, you've probably heard all the home remedies that are supposed to ease the symptoms. And there's a new one you should probably be aware of. They have these eyeglasses that supposedly prevent motion sickness. Now, I've never tried them because I typically don't get car sick, but recently, Reader's Digest tested them out, and if you haven't seen them, they look a little weird.

They're kind of these big, googly eyed glasses that contain two holes to look through in the front, and then there's also two holes to the side of each eye. The holes at the side protect the wearer's peripheral vision from becoming sensitive to motion, which is often what brings on that dizzy, sick feeling. But the glasses don't contain lenses. Instead, they use a leveling liquid to synchronize eyes as they move. Do they work?

Well, the Reader's Digest tester said they did. And they have a lot of five star ratings and reviews on Amazon. And since they only cost about $24, it might be worth giving them a try. By the way, they're not an advertiser. We're not being paid to say this.

It's just that I know how car sickness can ruin a trip. So I figured that's something you should know.

Here's a term you may not have heard, toxic individualism. It refers to the idea that people in our culture have become more focused on themselves, as in, its all about me. And this has created a big problem for relationships because how can you be in a relationship which is all about us when your focus is all about you? This is according to Terrence Riehl. He's an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker and author who's written some incredibly successful books on relationships, including I don't want to talk about it and the new rules of marriage.

His latest book is called getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship, which has already become a big bestseller in just a few weeks. Hey, Terrence. Welcome. Well, thank you. It's a joy to be here.

So explain your view of relationships as it relates to that term that you have coined, toxic individualism. Michael, our relationships are our biospheres. We're not outside of them, in them. And once we realize ecological humility, once we realize that you're in your marriage, you're not above it, then everything changes. You can choose to pollute your biosphere by having a temper tantrum over here, but you're going to breathe in that pollution, in your partner's withdrawal or lack of generosity.

Okay, but I think the concern is that even in a relationship, we are individuals. We are people, and we don't want to lose ourselves for the sake of the relationship. I'm not saying that there isn't such a thing as an individual. And yes, you are an individual with your own wants and needs. Good.

Terrence Real
I want you to assert that, but I want you to assert it in the wisdom of a larger context. We are a team. What are we going to do? You know, it's the difference between saying, michael, don't talk to me like that, which is fair enough. And saying, hey, look, I want to hear what you have to say.

Could you tone it down so I could really listen? It's remembering that you and I are a team. And it is in my interest, my enlightened self interest, for both of us to be able to work together, to make this work for both of us. That seems very logical and normal and right. And yet people struggle with it, because in the heat of the moment, it is often very hard to take that very measured approach of, why can't we just talk about this like grownups?

That's exactly right. And when I'm working with a couple, the biggest question is, who am I talking to? Which part of you am I talking to? You're dead on. Am I talking to the grown up part of you?

We call it the prefrontal cortex part of the brain. I call it the wise adult. Or am I talking to some triggered part of you that has everything to do with your trauma and how you adapted to that trauma. Fight, flight, or fix. It's knee jerk automatic.

And that's the reactive part of us that gets us into so much trouble. And the essence of my work is what I call relational mindfulness. Precisely in that heated moment, how to cultivate the skill, build the muscle of taking a break. I'm a big fan of breaks. Counting the ten, splashing some more.

Doing whatever you need to do to remember, love. Remember that the person you're speaking to is not the enemy. And that the reason why you're speaking is to make things better. If you're not in that place, if you're in that reactive place, take a walk around the block. Take a break.

Have a little chat with your little boy or girl inside. But get centered and then go back into the fray. That's the only way that things are going to get better. One of the things I've always thought wears relationships down is that when there is a problem, when there is conflict, it's often the same old thing. You've fought about this before.

Mike Carruthers
You've had a conflict over this before. It's not like we're coming up with new and exciting things to fight about. It's the same thing. And that. And that.

It just gets wearing. Can I tell you a story? Of course. So I deal with couples on the brink of divorce that's my specialty. And this couple was on the brink of divorce.

Terrence Real
The guy was a chronic liar. He lied about everything. So that is his repeated adaptive child stance. Over and over again, he lies. All right, so I'm a relational therapist.

I think relationally. I ask him something that when you're thinking as individuals, you would think, oh, how did he get that? I say to him, who tried to control you growing up? See, the guy had a black belt in evasion. Where did he learn that?

What was he adopting to? Who did he evade? Sure enough, my father. Tell me about it. Military man, utterly controlling.

How he ate, how he sat, everything. I say to him, how did you cope with this guy? And he looks at me and smiles. I like that smile. And he says to me, I lied.

Smart little boy. I teach my students, always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child you did back then, just what you needed to do to survive and be whole, but adaptive. Then maladaptive. Now, he's not that little boy. His wife is not his father.

So we surface. All this is a true story. They come back two weeks later, hand in hand, all smiles were cured. Okay, there's a tale here. Tell me.

He goes to the grocery store with a list of twelve things from his wife, and true to form, he comes back with eleven. The wife says to him, where's the pumpernickel? He says, every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say they were out of it. But in this moment, on this day, I thought of you. I gathered my courage, I looked my wife in the eye and I said, I forgot.

And she burst into tears and said, I've been waiting for this moment for 25 years. That's moving out of that automatic adaptive child response we learned as kids and reaching for something new, different, more mature, and more skilled, and we can learn to do that. So what's one simple thing people can do to get with the program here? Make a contract to take breaks. I'm a big fan of physical breaks.

If you can't control yourself while you're standing there. Okay, I'm going to take 20 minutes. I'll be back. Always say when you're coming back, don't leave it open ended, and then go for a walk around the block. Splash some water on your face, talk to that little boy who feels so controlled.

Do some breathing, do some meditation. There are millions of exercises now to help you get re centered, but get back in the place where it's not you versus me in a zero sum win lose power struggle. I remember love. I remember that you are someone I care about. And it's in my interest to work with you as a teammate to make this work for both of us.

Once you're centered there, there's a host of skills you can use, but you won't use any of them until you're out of your reactive brain and into your wise adult. That's the skill to cultivate. Take the break and don't come back until you're in your right mind. So, theoretically, if a couple is together, there was something, at least in the beginning, that brought them together and made them commit to each other. And obviously, everybody's different.

Mike Carruthers
But what tends to go wrong? Well, I have a saying. We all marry our unfinished business. We all marry our mothers and fathers. We all become our mothers and fathers.

Terrence Real
And we think when we fall in love, this person is going to complete me. This person is going to heal me. I'm going to get what I never got. And of course, real long term relationships come when you realize this person is going to re injure me in exactly the ways I was injured as a kid. That doesn't mean you're in a bad relationship.

That's intimacy. I just did a piece for the New York Times on what I call normal marital hatred. It's okay to cross from harmony through disharmony into repair, but you have to know how you know there are millions of people who would not throw you into your old wombs, but they didn't blip on your screen. We, we connect in long term relationships with someone who is close enough to what we grew up with, that we go back into the old drama, but someone who, unless we're very unlucky, someone who has other skills and resources so that if we do something different, they can do something different. And that changes the dance.

And that's what heals us. Not that we get it out of them, but that when we do something different, they'll come along with us. That's what healing our trauma looks like. We're talking about relationships with therapist Terrence real. The name of his book is us getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship.

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Head to Walmart.com to find the Vizio Quantum Pro today. Its been a while since ive talked about the Jordan Harbinger show, but ive been listening all along. The Jordan Harbinger show is a podcast that I'm going to predict you will really like. Since you like this podcast, something you should know. With each episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show, Jordan digs deep into fascinating topics with fascinating people.

Mike Carruthers
It's a little different than the topics we cover, but still so, so interesting. Recently he had a great two part conversation with ex federal agent Robert Mazzur about how money laundering works. Now I've always wondered about that and well, now I know. And there was another great conversation with Adam Gamal. He's an american Muslim who fought terrorism in one of the US's most secret special forces units.

It is a riveting conversation. If you want to broaden your worldview and discover some truly thought provoking ideas and insights, you really should try the Jordan Harbinger show. As you'll hear, Jordan is a great interviewer and really gets people to open up. Search for the Jordan Harbinger show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Terry, it seems that the experience of relationships is often that things go bad very slowly.

Like you hardly notice it day to day. And then I. Then one day it's broken. Yeah, you're right. I talk about what I call fierce intimacy, that you have to be fierce with each other.

Terrence Real
You have to take each other on in skilled, loving ways and you have to tell the truth to each other. You have to deal with each other. And most couples don't. They say that they're compromising, but really they're settling. Resentment builds.

Sexuality and generosity dies and they look like everybody else. I have empathy for people who stop challenging each other in these passionate ways because when we do, most of us just don't have enough skill to be successful at it. The person we're speaking to gets defensive, or we're pretty hostile when we finally talk to them. You have to know how to do it. For example, how to stand up for yourself and be loving and cherishing of your partner in the same breath.

Nobody knows how to do that. How do you do that? Hey, Michael, when you called me an old fat chauvinist pig a minute ago, that pushed me to the other side of the wall. And I'd like to be close to you can. You say you're sorry and do something reparative so I can feel close to you again.

There are ways to be powerful and loving in the same breath. But our culture doesn't teach us. You talk about, you've mentioned a couple of times the idea of repair and repair implies that something is broken. And in a relationship, sometimes when it's broken, things get said and they're hard to let go. I mean, even when you apologize, you still said it.

Mike Carruthers
You can't unhear it. And sometimes it stings. It's hard to repair. Well, it is hard. Of course it's hard.

Terrence Real
But, you know, there's also repair. If your partner says, oh, God, that was terrible of me, I really blew it. And I do love you, and I don't think of you as a chauvinist pig, and I'm really sorry. I hope you accept my apology. My advice would be, take a deep breath and accept the apology and make some tea and get on with your life.

The problem withholding resentment is that it's bad for you. Someone said a resentment is drinking poison and waiting for the other guy to die. Let repair happen. All relationships are an endless stance of harmony. Disharmony and repair.

Closeness, disruption and a return to closeness. And all of the skills come in when you move from disharmony to repair. The problem is when you move into that disharmony phase, you often get triggered and reactive, and you have to take a breath and keep your head in the game in order to use the skills of repair. What about when one person in a relationship just feels like enough's enough? There's nothing more here for me.

Mike Carruthers
I can't go on. I would invite everybody onto my website if I could. Terryreal.com just my name. I have a piece called rowing to nowhere. When is enough enough?

Terrence Real
An article I wrote, and I ask people to do what I call a relational reckoning. And it consists of this. Am I getting enough in this relationship to make grieving what I'm not getting worth my while? Am I getting enough to make the pain of my partner's imperfections worthwhile to me? Okay.

And if the answer is no, I'm not. Then go and fight and get some help and maybe leave. But if the answer is yes, my partner is a real pain in the neck. And this and this and this way. But gosh, they're a love in these ways.

Then don't be a resentful victim. Embrace what you get and enjoy it. Something you often hear people say about relationships is relationships take work but I'm not really sure what that means. I believe that the real work of relationships isn't even day to day. It's minute to minute.

In this minute, right now, in the heat of the moment, am I going to look at this person as someone I care about or am I going to look at this person as the enemy? Am I going to do my same old knee jerk response, angry complaint, for example, or am I going to reach for something different? And that's our choice in this moment and our fate is made up in these momentary decisions over and over and over again. Heres a really unfair question to ask you but im going to ask it anyway because I really would like to get your opinion on this. What is it?

Mike Carruthers
When you look at all the relationships that you see, what is it? If you had to pick one thing, what is it that goes wrong? Most of us, our relationship to relationships is passive. In this culture you get what you get and then you complain about it. Most of us try and get more of what we want from our partners by complaining about what they do wrong.

Terrence Real
That's got to be the most stupid behavioral modification program I've ever heard of. I want people to be more proactive up front and less resentful on the back end. So for example, if I want my wife to listen to me sympathetically because I've had a fight with somebody, she has this great way of turning it into a teachable moment and siding with the idiot I'm fighting with. Well, you know, they really have a point about you there. No, no, no, no.

And then I'd flip out. Nowadays on a good day anyway, I would say, hey listen Belinda, I just had a fight. I want about ten minutes of venting. I don't want you to side with that with my guy I'm fighting with. I don't want you to teach me anything to solve my problem.

I just want you to be on my side. Say something like hey baby, that sucks, I'm sorry. Can you give me ten minutes of that? And she will. If I help her by instructing her, if I just leave it to her, we're doomed to failure.

And then I get mad and then she gets mad. We can help our partners deliver for us by empowering them to give us what we want. Yes, let's speak up for what we want, but let's do it in a way that's skilled and that actually might deliver what we want. Yeah, well see that's interesting because most people I don't think would think to say that can you. Here's what I want you to give me for ten minutes.

Mike Carruthers
It's more of, if you don't, I'll get mad. But you need to figure out what it is I want. Right? That's exactly right. You know, we don't treat our kids that way.

Terrence Real
We make our expectations clearer. We don't treat our pets that way. We don't train a pet by punishing them every time they don't get it right. We help them out, we teach them what we want, and then we reward them when they get it right. I would like us to treat our spouses as well as we treat our pets well.

Mike Carruthers
But it begs that question, why don't we? Why is that not just a natural way of doing it? Because we live in an anti relational, immature, narcissistic, individualistic, patriarchal culture that gives lip service to relationships but doesn't really value them. We do not teach our sons and daughters the skills they need, the basic skills of relationship, and yet we've never wanted more out of our relationships. We want to be lifelong lovers, but we simply don't have the basic skills to pull it off.

Terrence Real
We need to know what the hell we're doing. There are skills to learn, and they're not even that hard. You just have to know what you're doing, and you have to keep your wits about you in those heated moments. One thing I want to get you to talk about is that when you're having a disagreement and you feel strongly about your point of view, how do you stand up for yourself and not, you know, not be a jerk about it, but still make your case? I'm sorry, but I got to tell you a story.

So I was at my friend. This standing up for yourself with love first came to me with a friend, Alice Slobodnik. I was on his porch a summer's day with the families, and I was mad about something, and I let him have it. And he looked at me, this is absolutely a true story. And he was vibrating with feeling.

I mean, it was intense between us. I had just really core dumped on a guy, and he said, look, Terry, the first and most important thing I want you to understand is that I love you. You're one of my best friends. You're going to be one of my best friends to the day we die. I.

Nothing I'm about to say has anything to do with that. Now, having said that, you come into my porch in the middle of my family, in the middle of my dinner that I've invited you into, and you dump a kind of righteous anger in me that, you know, I grew up with. I spent my whole life protecting my family from. I don't like it. Now, let me be clear.

I don't want to control you and I can't. You do what you do, but every time you dump that kind of nasty energy on me, I'm going to tell you just how much I don't like it. And I don't. And I looked at him and Michael, he had me with I love you.

If he had just led with his rebuttal, I'm a fighter, I would know just what to do with that. But when he started off by cherishing our relationship and then said his feelings, I could hear it. And I looked at him and to my own surprise, this is true story. I said, you're right. You don't deserve it.

I'm sorry. And then we had dinner together. That's the first instance that I was woken up to this idea of standing up for yourself with love. Well, I think anybody who's in a relationship or has been in a relationship or I is thinking about being in a relationship ought to download this episode, if they haven't already, and save it and, you know, pull it out and listen to it from time to time, especially maybe when things get tough. I've been speaking with Terrence Riehl.

Mike Carruthers
He is an internationally recognized therapist, speaker and author. The name of his book is us getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. I'll also put in the show notes, his website, a link to his website as well. Thanks, Terry.

This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks, Mike. It has. It's been a great pleasure talking to you.

You and I are surrounded by fragrances. There are fragrances in everyday products like soaps and shampoos and laundry detergent, as well as in very expensive perfumes. We seem to like things that smell good, and a lot of those good smells come from nature. So what is it about fragrances that we like so much? And how did putting those fragrances into bottles and then spraying it on ourselves become such a big industry?

It's actually a pretty interesting story, and the person to tell it is Elise Perlstein. She is a natural perfumer consultant and educator who conducts classes for corporate and private events and instructs students on the biology, artistry and history of perfume ingredients. She's author of a book called a Natural History of Fragrance. Hi, Elise. Welcome to something you should know.

Elise Pearlstine
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me here. I'm glad to talk about fragrance. Well, here's something interesting that I hadn't thought about until I saw your book, and that is, we all walk by plants and flowers all the time, that smell good and we enjoy that smell, but clearly the plant didn't do it for our benefit. That's absolutely true.

And over the years of teaching about fragrance and teaching perfume classes, one of the iconic fragrances is jasmine. It's gorgeous, it's complex, we love it. It's almost in every perfume, you know, some version. And yet the jasmine plant does not make that fragrance for us. Its flowers put out probably several hundred molecules that are each a little bit different in fragrance.

But the purpose and the goal is to attract moths, those little flying, not butterflies, but the nocturnal version with big antennae that are very sensitive to fragrance. And the reason it's moths is because jasmines are white flowers and they bloom at night. Their fragrance is best at night. What it does for the moths is create what they call a scent plume. If the moth is flying through the garden, it will key in on that fragrance back to the flower, where then it will pollinate that jasmine flower.

Mike Carruthers
So at some point someone must have said, you know, that flower smells so nice, we should do something with that smell. We should put it in a bottle and have perfume. But are flowers also bred for fragrance, or we just find the fragrance in the flowers, in nature and try to duplicate that, or what, I don't know. Why we haven't done more with it. There is actually very little breeding for fragrance.

Elise Pearlstine
And the story of roses kind of points that out. Roses, now that you find in the store, don't smell. Everybody puts their nose down, but there really is not a fragrance that compares in any way to the wild roses, which are out there attracting pollinators. And there's a theory that somewhere in the last couple hundred years, people have moved from paying attention to all of our senses, where smell is as important as hearing, is as important as vision. But we moved into being very primarily focused on our vision, our sight.

So we appreciate the way the petals of the rose curl so nicely, where we appreciate bright colors in our garden. And so we've bred fragrance out, not on purpose, but we've put a primary emphasis on color and form in those visual things. There are some exceptions to that. You know, lavender is a very, very important aromatherapy and perfume plant. I'm sure there's breeding for that.

Mike Carruthers
So at what point did people start taking the fragrance of flowers and put them in a bottle and call it perfume. And how did they do that up. Until, really, the industrial revolution and the invention of distillation, which was before that. But there were a lot of pieces that had to come together to be able to make perfumes. It takes a lot of roses to make a rose extract, you know, on the order of two or 3 million roses to make about a pound.

Elise Pearlstine
And so for centuries, perfume was relegated to the wealthy and the people who could afford that luxury. But as chemists became involved in fragrance, somewhere in the late 18 hundreds, they began analyzing the molecules in the plants with the idea of, well, if we can make this molecule in a lab and we can take some of the things that jasmine uses to make that gorgeous fragrance, maybe we can recreate a more affordable version of a jasmine. And so it really took moving away as much, but not totally, from using actual flowers to finding out the molecules that were in the flowers and using those to reach create a white flower fragrance or a rose. So in today's fragrance world, are a lot of perfumes not made from flowers, but manufactured in a lab? Yes.

For example, violets were always extremely expensive to extract from the flowers. There's very little. But you can take iris roots, which have a very similar fragrance, and you can grow irises a lot easier. But then chemists took those iris roots and analyzed them and came out with a chemical called ionone that has that violet fragrance, very much less expensive. And if you remember, I talked about jasmine having, you know, several hundred different ingredients, and jasmine and all of our scented plants have a terroir.

They will like wine, they will change with a year, or they will change with the soil. And that's great, that's wonderful. But if you're producing perfumes on a massive scale, you want to be able to replicate the same perfume year after year. And so the industry has moved to use single molecules in particular blends to replicate flowers, so that you've got replicability, you know what you're going to get, and you've got affordability. And this is where you also made the change into perfume as kind of a fashion statement, more part of a way of life.

Mike Carruthers
So today, are there perfumes that are still made from real flowers, or is that just gone? It's not gone. It is your higher end perfumes, especially those made in France, in the little town of Grasse, which is on the south of France. That's the kind of the home of the perfume industry. Some of the big houses grow their own jasmine, and they put some jasmine in.

Elise Pearlstine
And I'm not a commercial perfumer. But I am fairly sure they also use some of those single aroma chemicals to beef up the jasmine. So a lot of the higher end perfumes will have some floral notes from flowers in them, but a lot of them do depend on these either synthesized or isolated chemicals to make up the bulk of the formula. So throughout history, though, has fragrance been used to kind of pretty up the fact that a lot of the world smells bad? Yes, until basically the late 17 hundreds or early 18 hundreds, smells were very personal, and the perception of smell was maybe a little bit different.

Good smells, pleasant smells, were a force for good. They meant good things, they meant health, they meant lack of disease, whereas bad smells denoted, you know, disease, bad things, evil, and so on. You know, the black death and the plague is a case in point. People turned, especially the poorer people, they turned to rosemary and oranges and lavender because they smelled good. They had uplifting fragrances that they felt would help counteract that evil, invisible thing that was making everybody sick.

Mike Carruthers
So many of the products, and whether it's soap or perfume or anything, seems to be floral based. A lot of the scents are either they smell like flowers or they're trying to smell like flowers. But there's a lot of really great smells that don't smell like flowers, like, you know, cinnamon rolls. But I don't know that anybody's captured that in a fragrance. Well, there's a whole area of perfumery called gourmand perfumes, and not so much cinnamon, but vanilla is very popular, some of the sweeter candy sort of scents.

Elise Pearlstine
There's also, and this is going back to the laundry soap aisle, kind of the smell of clean. Hundred years of research have led to these particular, you know, kind of a white musk or clean scent that those of us, at least in the western world, identify with cleanliness. If you spend a lot of time, maybe in a spa, the scent of lavender, you know, and some of those are very clean or refreshing, let me say refreshing and uplifting. There seems to be, I don't know if you would call it, like, a backlash against everything having some aroma, some fragrance to it. I'm part of that backlash, I guess, because I have a sensitivity, I don't know if it's an allergy or what, but there are a lot of fragrances, a lot of perfumes that make my nose stuffy.

Mike Carruthers
I don't enjoy the smell, and I know a lot of other people have that sensitivity to being overwhelmed by so many fragrances. I totally agree with you. And my house is as absent from smell as I can make it. We make soap, I make perfume, but I put all the ingredients in little plastic boxes and put them away. And there are a lot of people, and it's probably more sensitivity than allergy.

Elise Pearlstine
And these little chemicals, if you think about it, they are made to go out into the air, some of them to persist so that they carry their message to the moth or the butterfly, and we are breathing those in. You know, if the air is moving and you're outside, it's really fun, it's nice. But if it's in your nose all the time, some people like that. For me, I'm totally with you. Too much is too much.

And more and more people are becoming sensitive. The other thing, too, is that people get used to fragrances. Like when you walk into a room that has a very particular smell, you quickly get used to it and you don't smell it anymore. Right. Basically, you're wearing out the neurons that are passing that message to your brain, and so you don't smell it anymore.

You know, if you leave your house for a couple of days and come back in, you say, oh, this is what my house smells like. And hopefully it's like, oh, it feels like home. Right, right. But if you're. Once you're in it for ten minutes, you completely.

You don't smell it. Smell it. Don't smell it anymore. Right. So when.

Mike Carruthers
When the idea of wearing perfume, of taking this liquid and putting it on your body so that you now smell like that smell, why do that? What's the theoretical basis for this is a good idea? It probably goes way back to where you were covering up the fact that you hadn't had a bath for a month or two. It goes way back to the idea of luxury, and rich people could afford musk and spices and things. But somewhere between the late 18 hundreds and the world wars, perfume became a statement of fashion, somewhat of luxury.

Elise Pearlstine
And it's packaged up. You know, people put it in a pretty lalique bottle, or you put it in a gorgeous package and it becomes indulgence. And then in the past 40 years, 20 years, you know, you see tv ads all the time with this star or that star pushing their particular scent. And you look at that and you say, well, if I wear that perfume, am I going to be as alluring? So there's a lot of messaging, and I would say a lot of the budget for perfumery comes down to messaging and packaging to support that 1oz of mostly alcohol.

Mike Carruthers
So I don't know much of anything about perfumes. That people wear. I don't wear them because of what we talked about. I'm very sensitive to that. But the only perfume I could even pull out of my mind that I remember is Chanel number five.

It seems to have been, become iconic. Everybody knows it. People still wear it. You can maybe identify the smell. What's so special about Coco Chanel's number five?

Elise Pearlstine
For perfume aficionados, it was very groundbreaking. She wanted a perfume that didn't make people smell like their mother, roses and violets. She wanted something very different. And the perfumer she hired really broke ground on adding unique ingredients. They call them aldehydes, which is kind of perfume talk, but it added an entirely different feel.

But then she was one of the early perfumers that tied that perfume to fashion. The famous little black dress, the elegance, the packaging. Her packaging was very spare and very elegant. Instead of big flowery bottles and pictures, it's a simple black box with her name, and the bottle was square. So hers was a big departure and a step ahead, I think, in the perfume business and the concept of perfumes.

Mike Carruthers
If that makes sense, but it has really stuck around. I mean, I imagine a lot of perfumes come and go, but that seems to, I mean, that's been around since when, the early 20th century, right? Yeah, you are absolutely right. She started a movement. She knew what she wanted to do, and people still appreciate that.

Elise Pearlstine
And it was beautifully composed. But a lot of people use that perfume, and isn't part of the thing about perfume is you don't want to smell like everybody else, but if everybody's wearing it, then we're all smelling like Coco Chanel. I really, I don't have any numbers on that, and I think a lot of people do. But from, you know, people I know they have their signature perfume, and it may be Chanel number five, but there's this thing where our skin makes a difference. Different perfumes smell different on different people.

Some people can wear florals and they smell great, and on some people, they turn kind of sour. And so when you do wear especially a very good perfume, it blends with your skin and it becomes a little bit more you. We've talked a lot about perfumes, but there are a lot of fragrances that I like that I'm sure other people like that aren't in perfumes. And I know maybe they've tried. For example, one of my favorite fragrances is that smell of freshly cut grass and also the smell of the beach.

Mike Carruthers
And I know they say they've tried to, you know, bottle that, but it doesn't smell what I think of as freshly cut grass or the beach. What is it? What is it about freshly cut grass that makes it so pleasing? Small molecules, little volatile, that send the message out that the grass is basically being eaten and danger. Danger.

Elise Pearlstine
And it actually communicates to other. So it's a protective smell. And pine trees have a similar smell. And if you've ever been to the great Smoky mountains, the smoke in the Smoky Mountains is actually from all the aromatic molecules that those pine trees and the other trees are putting out. Well, I find those fragrances, those scents in nature to be very relaxing and therapeutic, and I'm sure other people do, too.

Mike Carruthers
So it's interesting to hear about the purpose and the history and the benefits of all these fragrances. Elise Perlstein has been my guest, and the name of her book is a natural history of fragrance. And you will find a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Elise. Thanks for coming on.

Elise Pearlstine
Thank you. I appreciate being able to tell some fragrant stories.

Mike Carruthers
How many times have you walked up to your car that's been part parked in the hot sun, open the door to get in, and it's just, it's just too hot. You can't get in it. So what's the fast way to cool a hot car down? Well, here's what the experts say. First, you roll down the passenger side window, then go to the driver's side and open the car door using the door handle.

With the passenger side window down, you're ready to create a low pressure area that sucks the hot air out and lets the cool air in. Then what you do is you open the driver side door and fan the door. In other words, rapidly push the door towards the car, stopping just short of actually closing it. Open it up again and repeat that six to eight times. Then get in your car, turn on the air conditioner and roll the windows down a bit, because, you know, when you first turn on the air conditioner, it blows hot air.

So you roll the windows down, that lets the hot air out, and within a few minutes, your car is nice and cool. And that is something you should know. So let me be really frank about something. Podcast listening has a tendency to dip in the summer, and we can't have that. We don't want our audience to dip.

So that means we need to get some new listeners. And the very best way for us to get listeners is to ask you to share this podcast with someone you know. And every platform in the world, I think, has a share button, Spotify, Apple, they all do. So it's easy to do and it would really help us. I'm Micah brothers.

Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Hey, guys. Welcome to the candy Valentino show. I'm Candy Valentino. I was a founder before I could legally order a drink.

Candy Valentino
And for for more than two and a half decades, I've built, scaled, acquired, and exited multiple businesses in diverse industries. Now, my goal is to help you by sharing the knowledge that I've learned, the mistakes that I've made, and the wisdom that I've developed over my journey. Bi weekly episodes every Monday and Thursday. The Candy Valentino show. Wherever you listen.

Mike Carruthers
Every story eventually comes to an end. This June, hear the final episode of season two of the hit podcast series in the Red Clay. Durham in the Red Clay tells the unbelievable true story of Billy Sunday Burt, the most dangerous man in Georgia history, in the podcast that people are calling riveting, incredibly moving, captivating, and addicting binge seasons one and two of in the red clay. Now, wherever you listen.

US: Getting Past the You and Me Relationship & How Fragrance Works - SYSK Choice

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1. Understanding Relationships

2. The Science and Allure of Fragrance

3. Practical Relationship Advice

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