What gets harder when nobody else is smelling it!

The most common complaint about our fragrances is that they don't project. Someone wears one for a day, genuinely likes it, then writes to say, almost apologetically, that nobody around them mentioned it. As if that's a problem. As if the point of wearing something close to your skin is to have it confirmed by strangers.

I want to write about why we keep asking that question. Because the question isn't really about perfume.

Indian cities are loud in a particular way. Not just the sound - the visual loudness, the social loudness, the constant pressure of being one of many in a place that doesn't have room for all of you. A Bombay local at 9.15 in the morning. A Delhi wedding with seven hundred guests where you're trying to find your cousin. A WhatsApp group with forty people in it where a message goes unanswered for nine hours and then forty messages arrive in the same minute. We grow up calibrated for this volume. We learn, without anyone teaching us, that being noticed is a survival skill. That fading into the background means losing your turn.

A loud fragrance fits into this calibration the way an extra layer of armour fits. It's the olfactory equivalent of speaking slightly louder than you need to in a meeting, so the room registers you. The uncle whose cologne arrived in the room before he did wasn't being inconsiderate. He was using a tool the way the rest of his generation used it - to make sure that in a country of a billion people, he, specifically, was perceptible.

This is not a small thing. I don't want to be dismissive about it. Anyone who has ever felt invisible in a crowded place understands the appeal of a fragrance that announces you.

But there's a cost to being perceptible all the time, and most of us are starting to feel it.

A lot of urban Indians I know are quietly tired of being noticed. Not in some grand existential way. In a small, daily way. Tired of the LinkedIn performance. Tired of being asked at family functions what their package is. Tired of the implicit pressure to make every life update Instagram-shaped before it gets shared. Tired of the calibration. Tired of running for it. There's a specific exhaustion in being a young professional in a Tier 1 Indian city right now, and I think part of it is the feeling that there is no version of your day in which you aren't being looked at, evaluated, ranked, or asked to perform.

A fragrance that stays close to your skin is, in a small way, a refusal of all that. Not a dramatic refusal. A quiet one. You apply it in the morning and it belongs to you. The colleague across the conference room won't know about it. The auntie at the function won't comment. The algorithm has nothing to say. The fragrance exists in the few inches around your body that haven't yet been colonised by anyone else's opinion.

This is what I think people are responding to when they tell us, weeks after the initial complaint, that they've come around. Not the chemistry. Not the materials. The fact that for the first time in a long while, they have something that doesn't require an audience. A small private pleasure in a life that has very few of them left.

A friend of mine in Bangalore wears the same fragrance to work every day. Has done for about two years. Nobody at her office has ever commented on it. She told me once that this is exactly why she likes it. It's the only part of my morning routine that nobody has an opinion about.

I think about that line a lot.

The fragrance only you can smell isn't a fragrance that failed to be louder. It's a fragrance that decided the only person it needed to reach was you. In a country that asks every young person to be perceptible at all times, in every direction, for every audience - that's not a small thing. It's a small piece of life you've protected.

The auntie can't comment on what she can't smell.