Schiaparelli - Shocking

Supposedly you're to get into perfume because of your mother. Everyone in the world has a swan-necked, well-heeled, triple-pearl-stranded mother who spent Saturday evenings in front of a vanity bedecked with mysterious pots of cold cream, Cherries In the Snow, and vials of Quadrille or Je Reviens or Chanel No. 5. Sons and daughters get delicate careful-not-to-smudge kisses from rouged lips and nuzzles in pale powdered necks and shoulders, bedazzled by glamourous aspirations . . .
That's a hunk of horseshit story, and I nearly threw up in my mouth writing that. (I think that rotten cliche is oneupmanship for snobs as to who wore the most rarified juice, etc etc)
My mother hated, HATES perfume.
She recoils.
Yes, she she had bottles of Magie Noire, Volupte, Anais Anais, and Youth Dew, but these were ill-judged gifts and resigned to a bottom drawer along with hideous orange-and-fuchsia doilies stitched in the late stages of her pregnancies.
My mother relied on powder, always faintly scented, and potpourri for her drawers.
No perfume, ever.
The only exception - and this was for practical purposes - was Limacol, an astringent Guyanese lotion roaring of artificial lemons and citruses that haven't been invented yet, all magnified to 50,000 kHz through a blaze of rubbing alcohol. Think of it as the West Indian 4711, splashed on liberally in the sweltering Jamaican heat.
In the summer we used it all - Mum, Dad, and I - and smelled like the humming of an army of shortwave radios.
Shocking, in its vintage eau de cologne concentration, has that medical, utilitarian shrillness, if it were coddled with talc and preserved in a chest-of-drawers, due to the bergamot and tarragon in its top notes. An hour later rich honey and rock-sugar civet develop.
It is a dead ringer for my mother, and I'm cackling about how if I offered her my wrist, she would turn her head and grumble (like she does for every perfume), even though it is her scent-doppelganger.