Things Women Do | QuirkOut

Women love perfume. We love applying it to our wrists, behind our ears and to our credit card bill.

The perfume commercials that reel us in are about as grounded in reality as the name of Paris Hilton’s scent Tease.

The ads show such beautiful stars wearing such stunning clothes. And they’re always doing such everyday things — like walking through castles, relaxing in fields of wheat and riding bareback in lingerie.

Well, how do you spend your Saturdays?

And there’s usually some incredibly gorgeous man waiting for them at the end of the commercial. (Dear “Mad Men,” we actually know those men are gay models.)

If the ads haven’t worked, there’s the point-of-purchase attack: the spritzer folks just waiting to you get you when you walk into the department store. Personally, we wear hazmat suits to avoid the whole smelly mess.

But it got us to thinking about how these QuirkOut ideas can keep us fresh and fragrant.

On the Scent

As a girl, Phoebe watched with rapt attention when her mother got ready for “an evening out,” splashing herself with Chanel No. 5 in that beautiful square bottle. It all just seemed so elegant.

Her mom wore only one fragrance and only for special occasions.

Today, Phoebe is on the other end of the smell-good spectrum — a perfume addict.

She likes to spice things up, and just like her spice jars, she stores her vast collection of fancy bottles in alphabetical order. From Amarige by Givenchy to Victoria Secret Coconut Passion Body Mist, her QuirkOut ritual is to rotate the bottles so she never repeats a scent.

Imagine if she wore Happy two days in a row at the office, especially when she was miserable doing the company audit. Or smelled of Romance for the entire week after she broke up with her boyfriend?

The confusion might make her co-workers faint, requiring smelling salts — which, thankfully, Phoebe has filed under “S.”

Enjoy the Salad Days

Our friend Moonbeam was brought up in the ’60s in a commune where natural was the only way to live. Today she’s a massage therapist in the city but still keeps her tie (dyes) to childhood. Yes, it’s important that she smell fresh as a daisy (and we don’t mean Daisy by Marc Jacobs), but it has to be without chemicals.

Instead of deodorant, she has a few QuirkOut replacements.

She drinks a glass of wheat grass on an empty stomach so the chlorophyll reduces body odor.

Or, she takes the juice from two dozen radishes and adds glycerin (note: don’t confuse with nitroglycerine) and puts it in a spray bottle. One spritz a day, and she’s good to go.

We can’t imagine what her produce bill is every month. And we wonder if she cuts the radishes into little roses before pulverizing them.

A Rose By Any Other Name

We’d love to be at the Madison Avenue meetings when marketing folks are naming perfumes. It must be filled with gray-haired men who know nothing about women, yet are trying to give us romantic goose bumps.

How else can you explain Simply Belle or Exceptional — Because You Are (which therapists really should sell in their waiting rooms).

Thinking about this gave us a QuirkOut idea. What would happen if perfume names told the truth about our lives and our loves? Here are a few ideas to start, but feel free to send us your thoughts, and we’ll post them on our QuirkOut Facebook page. Funniest entry wins a prize.

My Sin = My Hookup

Obsession = Pass the Potato Chips

Fancy Love = Redbox Romance

Escape = Sandals at Sandals

Eternity = Serial Monogamy

DKNY Be Delicious = Eau de Krispy Kreme

Fashion icon Coco Chanel said, “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.” 

Clearly, Ms. Chanel never met the $900 Jimmy Choo stilettos that send many a well-heeled woman to the podiatrist.

Too often, looking really good can mean feeling really bad.

Other times, we don’t realize until we’re out and about that things are going to get bad. Like on an overseas flight when it occurs that buying the “irregular-sized” thong at the outlet mall wasn’t a good idea.

Since we agree with Billy Crystal’s mantra, “It is better to look good than to feel good,” we know that QuirkOut stamina is needed when sacrificing comfort for compliments.

Belt It Out

The Wall Street Journal has us cringing. A recent article (“Tight Ties, Killer Heels: Clothes Make the Fashion Victim“) warned that our clothing is causing real damage — to something other than our bank accounts.

The story reports on a woman who saw a neurologist for numbness in her legs. His expert diagnosis: Her belt was too tight. It compressed a major nerve with a long Latin name. But luckily she’s in good company. The doctor says this happens to police officers who carry guns on their hips and ballet dancers who wear tight tutus.

Now the American Chiropractic Association says women should carry no more than 10 percent of their body weight in their purses or risk extreme back pain. Only 10 percent? We have 30 percent in our wallets alone, thank you FroYo customer loyalty punch cards.

We appreciate the warnings, although we probably won’t heed them. Especially if our skinny jeans make us look like we’re 16 years old again. How about we make the QuirkOut promise to loosen our tutus?

GoodBuy Girl

Roberta loves to combine her love of clothes with her love of a good deal. Normally this is a match made in heaven — until it creates discomfort from hell.

Take the Norma Kamali outfit she bought at Walmart. The designer outfit was gorgeous and cheap, but they were out of her size, so she settled for the dress in an 8.

Roberta explains, “In the morning, I’m fine, and the tight dress forces me to sit up straight. At lunch I’m so squeezed that I order water and a toothpick. By 5 p.m. I pray I can make it to my car before the seams split and I’m naked.”

We’ve all made QuirkOut bargains with ourselves in the dressing room to justify a bargain buy. “I’m just bloated today,” or “Spanx will fix this” and the mother of them all, “I can lose 10 pounds by the party next weekend.”

The Wax Museum

When it comes to beauty, we’d like to wax poetic. But there’s no poetry in having burning hot wax applied to the most sensitive parts of your body, then having it ripped off with the intensity of a Navy Seal on a mission.

There are rumors that bikini waxing began as a form of torture used during the Crusades, but we have no proof. What we know for certain is that this is pain only women could endure — like childbirth.

And, if the pain doesn’t do you in, the humiliation will. After all, the aesthetician goes places where husbands aren’t even allowed to venture.

So follow our QuirkOut tips for the pain — drink a vodka martini in the waiting room, bite your lip during the procedure and at the end, scream out like Steve Carell when he got his chest hair waxed in the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin.” For the record, we don’t shout “Kelly Clarkson,” we shout “Bradley Cooper!”

What clothes do you have that create pain?

How we long for glamorous experiences with our doctors like the kind we see on TV.

We pray to be examined by the handsome Dr. Oz and imagine him staring into our eyes, talking heart to heart — about cholesterol.

We hope for the excitement of checking into “General Hospital” when the building is on lockdown because the vendetta between the Spencers and Cassadines means a hit man took a nurse hostage.

Admittedly we hope never to see Dr. House, which would mean we have a rare feverish brain infection from swimming in the Amazon River.

Women do have very special relationships with doctors, though not the kind of special we imagine an appointment with Dr. McDreamy might be.

No, for us regular gals, doctors are the pedigreed professionals we co-pay to inspect and criticize our every physical insecurity — er, attribute. So no surprise that these appointments inspire lots of QuirkOut behaviors.

Physical Phobia

Bridget could never be a hypochondriac. She hates going to the doctor even more than her husband does. She admits she gets queasy thinking about her annual physical — although she’s seen the same doctor from puberty through menopause.

Now, we’re no Dr. Drew, but we might prescribe going cold turkey on the “Mystery Diagnosis” show she likes to watch if she has any hope of making it through an exam relaxed enough to register a normal blood pressure.

So as soon as Bridget makes her doctor appointment, she dials up another QuirkOut appointment. She puts a manicure and pedicure on the books — scheduled just ahead of her doctor’s visit.

Not only does she feel acceptably groomed for her exam, she basks in the calming effect of a foot massage. It’s the spoonful of sugar scrub that helps the medicine go down.

Kate Plus Eight Plus the Doctor

Lots of mothers confess that during pregnancy they develop crushes on their OB/GYNs. It’s not that strange, really. It’s just a mild case of the Stockholm syndrome — that phenomenon where hostages feel affection for their captors.

Kelly knows this QuirkOut pattern well. She has four kids. “At a certain point during pregnancy, we feel held prisoner by the doctor,” she said. You can see it in the eyes of third-trimester mothers-to-be in the waiting room.

“Week after week, we’re praying for that magical checkup when we hear there’s progress,” Kelly explains. “Or better yet, that it’s time to induce.”

Yes, the doctor is our captor — until the baby comes along and holds us hostage for the next 18-plus years.

Patient Unmentionables

Some doctors visits require a full body scan. A check under the hood, if you will. And this means stripping down to our full glory.

Oh, the dreaded moment of getting into that paper gown. For every woman, it brings up the question: What to do with our clothes? And that brings out our universal QuirkOut ritual.

Whether you’re a slob or an neat freak, you fold your duds into a perfectly tidy stack. Because we can take it when the doctor chastises us for not exercising enough, not wearing sunscreen or forgetting our Flintstones Chewables, but we would never get over her thinking we’re (gasp!) messy.

And of course our bras and panties are carefully hidden in the middle of the orderly pile of clothes. Even though the doctor is about to peek at our most personal zones, we can’t possibly let him see our undergarments.

That’s just way too much information to share.

Here’s a single-girl-shower Quirk Out from a friend of ours.  Long before he came to pick her up, Jackie decided how, um, cozy she’d get with her date that night.  If she wanted to keep things G-rated, she didn’t shave her legs.  The friendlier they got, the higher up her legs she’d shave.

It was kind of an insurance policy against an impulsive decision she didn’t want to regret.

A stubbly chastity belt, if you will.

I couldn’t help think about this Quirk Out while reading this story on Jezebel.  They’re discussing the reality of The Body Shop’s  suggestion on Earth Day that everyone limit their showers to three minutes.

Yes, it is environmentally friendly to keep the showers short.  Can we agree that it’s OK to add a few minutes if you want to get “datefully” friendly?