It’s spring in the late 1970s… as light, warm breezes ruffle through the halls of the middle and high school, you can catch the scent of cheap teen-girl perfume.

It was part of my daily routine and the last thing I did before leaving the house for school or any social event. At least 4-5 squirts..lol 

Like most girls my age, I owned Love’s Baby Soft as my first scent. It smelled like baby powder, clean laundry, and florals. It was subtle, that’s why I used to pile it on. My motto was ‘the more the better’. It was packaged in a soft pink glass bottle with a white domed cap. So timeless. 

Remember the Love’s Baby Soft print commercials in all the teen magazines that promoted the perfume? The models wore those infamous cute pink t-shirts with the blue bow. Their hair was always long and perfectly curled. Sign. Those girls were beautiful.

Joven Musk was another popular perfume. I didn’t even have to Google it to remember what it looked like. It was a tall, square cylinder with an orange lid. The glass bottle had raised vertical lines in it. If you didn’t wear musk perfume in the 70s/80s, who were you?..lol Musk was a primo scent to use, especially after gym class.

One of my favorite, frequently used perfumes was Odyssey by Avon. Yes, Avon. My aunt was a rep for them for years, and I think that’s how I started using it. It must have worked well with my chemistry because every time I wore it, classmates always told me how good I smelled. When you’re complimented like that at an impressionable young age, you tend to stick with it. 

There were some really bad scents we wore that would probably give me an instant headache today. Remember Babe, Coty Wild Musk, Georgio, and White Shoulders? If you got any of those as a gift, you were golden! By the time I was in high school, I had quite a collection of colognes. (Or as my Dad pronounced it to be funny, co-log-nee)

..and most of these perfumes you could test in your favorite magazine. Remember rubbing your wrist on the pages of Seventeen, and sometimes getting a cut from the heavy sample paper? 

In my recollection, how you smelled was as important as how you looked in our teenage years. The bottles I kept in the top drawer in our shared bathroom were held in high regard because they made me feel confident and pretty. 

As a middle-aged woman, I feel it’s still a good choice to use lip gloss, nail polish, and a squirt of something that smells good…