Seeing is.. experiencing?

Hey guys

So today was a bit of a disaster on the technology front, with my internet deciding to PMS out on me every so often. I was initially unsure about which sense to blog about today but I guess that it's going to be sight.

We live in a sight orientated world. The internet is that thing you look at for hours.
Like right now, you lovely people that read this are probably reading this whilst surfing waves of binary, looking for something vaguely interesting to look at/ read/ use as procrastination.
(If waves of binary is inaccurate, I apologise for my lack of technological lingo. And I quote: 'I'm a writer. I give the truth scope!' Well, descriptive flare, shall we say.)

Anyway, point is, whenever I keep losing my access to BBC iplayer (which, as I am sans TV right now, I am addicted to) it gets me thinking about how much I use sight. I mean, I'm an English student. I used my eyes so much last year my prescription actually got worse. I love reading and want a career that is involved in the written word. It would be so much more difficult if one day, I found that I couldn't see. What would I do?
Out of all the senses people live without, the lack of sight is most conspicuous, especially now, as technology becomes more and more influenced by things like the touch screen for example. There's nothing to feel there for someone who can't see, so how do they know that they've typed the right thing? The way people with sight problems navigate in a visually-operated world amazes me.
Sight, the lack of it, the way blind people are treated and our dependence on visual matter are also the most contentious of issues surrounding how we experience the world. With the creation of Skype, Facetime and Snapchat, the power of the image has never been more relevant. Snapchat in particular highlights modern culture's need not only to capture a moment and communicate with it but also its reliance on everyone being keyed into the same visual mindset. The thing is, what about the other ways we experience the world?

Whilst we overwhelm our heads with visual experience and  forget about using our other senses quite as much? Will we just take it for granted that we'll always be able to function in the world when (according to website Fight for Sight http://fightforsight.org.uk/statistics-about-blindness-and-eye-disease ) about 285 million people have sight problems and most of those problems do not exist from birth? Will we rely on images to tell us what life is like 'out there' and stay in with the TV, the computer, magazines etc because if you've seen it, you've experienced what it is like?
I hope not. I'd trade you hearing my favourite person's voice, or eating my favourite dinner anytime over yet another picture someone took of themselves in a fabulous place.
Go out. See the world. But smell, taste, touch and hear it too.

Coming up smelling of roses...

Hello ladies and gents,
 Over the next five weeks, I've decided to make a series of blogs on the theme of the senses, following a very unsubtle conversation with my boyfriend about perfume. To illustrate, the conversation began like this:

Him: In other news
Me: yes?
Him: And this is early days
Me: yes?
Him: But could you like investigate perfumes and stuff
Me: why? any reason?
Him: Just so I can get an idea for which ones you like
Me: :D

He's just so hard to read. Like a sphinx, he is. :p
Anyway, his not-so-stealthy efforts did provoke some rather interesting notes about smell. Even though as a culture we don't rate smell highly among the senses, scent is very personal.

And yes, that can be in a 'oh no that guy over there has the BO of a drunken rhinoceros' kind of way, but I was leading up to the more refined and dignified issue of what scent says about people. (FYI, have no clue what a wasted rhino would smell like but I guess it's pretty bad).
Because, believe it or not, I was actually pretty pleased that he actually asked me what to get. If he'd just went out to the local health and beauty shop and bought something, chances are he'd have easily got me something I hated without knowing, until I spritzed it for the first time, nose wrinkling as I whiffed sickeningly of creme brulee or Parma Violets*. Ergh.

I like to smell of something fairly upbeat, fruity and floral, fresh but classic at the same time. I like to think it reflects my personality and taste, but maybe describing myself as classy is wishful thinking. This wishful thinking, of instantly wanting to project the best version of oneself even on the most instinctive of levels is, in a wider sense, the product and cause of the huge industry surrounding perfume, that has now taken smelling nice to competitive levels of exclusive brands, celebrity promotion and a whole other language of eau de parfum vs. eau de toilette, bouquets and essences, base notes and top notes. Smelling better than your peers is actually a thing. Scent snobbery, if you will, drives people to even tailor make their own individualised, customised boutique odour.
Does that really even matter? you ask. Most of us just want to smell nice.

Smell is instant, instinctive. It's good or bad, delicious or disgusting, acrid or aromatic. Smell can also grow on you, like when a perfume sinks into your skin, mingling with whatever you washed yourself with that day. Smell links you straight back to times and places you love (or hate), food you ate and people who made it or people who wore that smell.

My mum not only has a nice outfit and coordinating earrings when she goes out, she also smells of Cacherel's Anais Anais or YSL's Rive Gauche. Whenever I smell them I think of her, but I also think of her whenever I smell someone making roast chicken, like she does. Yes, her fragrances aren't boutique, her tastes aren't the newest scent with the hippest label or the best packaging. Roast chicken wafting from the fan oven isn't exactly the scent of rose petals in Marrakesh or street food in Thailand, but to me, they smell of home and of a woman of substance. They smell real.

At the end of the day, we can think smell doesn't matter, that the perfume industry is a giant marketing tool on an endless quest to both provoke and assuage our consumer needs and that sight or sound is far more important to our world. And in many ways, that'd be about right. It's my mum who makes those smells in any way important to me. But with them, my memories of her are enhanced, they suit her personality and I think of her every time I see Cacherel's unassuming pearly white and pinky packaging on the shelf.
 I'd much rather have mum's roast chicken than bathe in Chanel no. 5 any day, but no matter what your favourite smell is, your memories would be worse off without them.;
Cheerio folks xx

*Yes, those are actual smells- scents that smells like desserts are called gourmand. For info about what perfume is made of, what certain brands are like and how to make smelly memories of your own, I looked at these sites and they seem pretty comprehensive.
http://www.basenotes.net/products/category/fragrances
http://www.perfumeintelligence.co.uk/#
http://kwonjh.blogspot.co.uk/