Nosy Interview: Wilson Diehl

 Wilson in The Antennae Galaxies in Collision, © NASA

Wilson and I met in a conference room, in a beautiful brick building in Pioneer Square. Our work-friend to real-life-friend transition was probably inappropriately speedy, and solidified by a marathon phone date that took the place of a coffee date made impossible by a rare Seattle snowstorm. Join Wilson for some virtual-friend tea-time yourself at Not Quite What I Expected.

What do you smell like?
Wow--that's a surprisingly hard question to answer. On a really good day, I'm pretty sure I smell like melty butter. Salted butter, just to be clear. Not margarine. Definitely not margarine.
 
I have a super-sensitive nose (not as precise and perceptive as yours, nosy girl, but still pretty persnickety) and find most scents-in-a-bottle too olfactorily overwhelming to put on my body. That said, I recently discovered this rosewater hand cream (yes, I'm a 36-year-old granny), which I love so much I apply it to my neck and upper chest region to make sure its warm, slightly sharp rosy splendor is as near my nose as possible. Why don't I just apply it to my actual nose? Unclear. Acne anxieties?
 
One semester in college I bought some cheap but delicious honeysuckle lotion from Bath & Body works (the worst!), and numerous strangers stopped me to tell me how good I smelled. It was almost as exciting as the two times in my life I was told I had a nice singing voice.

What do you like to smell?
It's so much easier to say what I don't like to smell...patchouli, incense, scented candles, dogs, cumin, lilies, the inside of my summer clogs, any garbage can anywhere, rat pee, my rat-filled garage, old coffee grounds (which smell like rat pee), stinky diapers, decay, Tacoma. When I was pregnant the smell of my husband's peppermint foot lotion and (non-peppermint) hair gel made me want to die. Same with the smell of smoke, fish, soap, the compost bin, and my favorite leather purse. Worst of all was the smell of coffee, which is a real problem since I live in Seattle and there is, in fact, a Starbucks on every corner.
 
I like to smell bread, muffins, cookies, pie (notice a trend?), nutmeg, rosemary, just-cut wood, roses, vanilla (again with the baking!), and bacon. When I'm not pregnant I love the scent of smoke, leather, and coffee, too.
 
I like to sniff my baby's head, even when she's three or four (or six) days post-bath and her head smells like wet dog. When she was tiny and exclusively eating breastmilk, her poo smelled like rhubarb, and I liked to smell that, too.
 
When she was just-born she smelled like brown sugar (even my husband with his less-refined sniffer agreed), and it was the best smell in the world. I've been trying to find a close approximation in lotion form, so far to no avail. For some reason every cream that's advertised as smelling like sugar smells like sweetened lilies. Why, nosy girl, why?