Smells Like Home

I hate buying stuff online. This goes for anything. It's hardly ever what I imagine it to be when I order, and not only am I out money for the crap item and shipping, I'm totally disappointed in my purchase.

Even more, I hate buying things from companies that seem to spring up out of nowhere and require my friends to advertise for them and hound unsuspecting social-network goers to buy stuff from these companies, so that my friends can see a penny or two. I'd rather just give you the five bucks instead of buying that shitty sticker set, know what I mean?

I don't want to go to your facebook party. I don't want to buy their crap from you so that you may eventually have the privilege of trying to get me to sell for them, too. I've seen this before. Before the days of the common internet, in fact. I have a Pampered Chef strainer that's collecting dust in a corner because it broke within moments of my using it. I just don't feel like buying crap from a company using my friends as pawns to stuff money in its own pockets.

All that being said, every once in a while, if I happen to have extra cash that day, and a friend of mine really and truly believes in whatever product they're peddling, I'll shell out for them. Last month, I agreed to buy some Scentsy from a friend of mine. I scrapped together 25 bucks, thinking that should be enough to buy a respectable product. Haha. No.

$25 is apparently nothing to this company. This company is high society. Get it together, Darlena, if you're going to try to shop Scentsy, okay?

So, I'm put off even further than usual, but I'd told my friend I'd buy something, so I searched the site looking for what I could afford. I passed by page after page of cute warmers, packages, combinations and scent bars. Nothing.

Finally, I found some little smell packets that you hang from a car mirror or a hook in the closet. I could afford two! But which scents did I want? As I looked at my options, I began to laugh out loud. Scentsy offers aromas like "Home Sweet Home" and "Kailua Bay." (These were the two I bought.) Way to not tell me at all what these actually smell like. Seriously, no descriptions or anything. It's like, take a gamble on a smell up in there.

But, here's the thing. You need to do this. Take a gamble on a smell. You won't regret it.

I expected some tacky car air-freshener type deals, but I got little fabric pillows of scent that actually look classy. I was impressed. I opened my mystery scents, expecting to laugh my head off because how dare a company presume to know what home sweet home smells like to me? How could a company bottle the smell of Kailua Bay, Hawaii? Impossible.

Only, Scentsy did it. I opened Kailua Bay and was transported to my father's house on the Big Island of Hawaii. I hung it in my closet.

I opened Home Sweet Home and I fell in love. It smelled like the house I grew up in. It made me want to do chores and go to church and rake leaves and do science homework, and not in a bad way. It's this potpourri-like smell tempered with something to make it less annoying and powdery and more authentic.

It's perfect. It's like some genius in their marketing department researched trendy scents in the 80s and decided "we need to bottle this up. People in their mid to late 20s are going to want this in their homes for nostalgic purposes."

And I do. This is what I want my house to smell like. Scentsy has won. They said it was home sweet home, and by God, it is home sweet home. This is the scent I want my children growing up with. This is what I want them to remember as they go out into the world, too.

This is what I want my house to smell like, and I didn't even know it.  You can bet the first opportunity I get to scrape together $40, I'm buying a warmer and brick of Home Sweet Home.

So, long story short is, I recommend Scentsy. And this is a recommendation coming from someone who hates this kind of stuff.

If you're interested in gambling on one of their ridiculously named scents, go here.


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