moonie

We see sweetness mentioned around Snow, with an almost absurd tone. His character is surrounded by things deemed as 'pure' and 'sweet'. The colour white, the mention of his granddaughter from Johanna, sugar, and (of course) the roses.

"President Snow pours tea for both of us and fills his with cream and sugar."

However, Katniss isn't fooled. She finds the perfume's scent so 'cloying' and 'artificial' that it makes her gag - even from the presence of just the one rose.

"My nose twitches. It's the smell. Cloying and artificial."

"When I begin to gag at the stench, I back away and clear out."

She also takes notice of the fact that his breath smells like blood, almost as if Snow himself is rotting from the inside out.

The sickly rose scent is generally regarded as his attempt to cover up the smell of blood. Katniss almost immediately seeing through this is so important because it allows us as readers to see through it and recognise that almost everything about him is artificial.

Although, I really like how the connection between the perfumed scent and the roses works because, as I mentioned above, roses smell disgustingly sweet when they're just about to rot.

Snow, the entire time, was just about to rot.

Katniss hated the perfume because (from her perspective) he was already rotten.

"The smell of blood... it was on his breath."

Later on in the series, Finnick reveals that Snow often drinks poison in order to poison and kill others. This we generally know to be the reason for his coughing up blood. Katniss notices his sickly state in the greenhouse, which I think is particularly interesting because (if I'm correct) previous physical descriptions of him remained snake-like or plastic. With Katniss taking particular notice of his 'puffy' or 'stretched out' lips. But Katniss notes that:

"In the bright light, his skin's a pale, sickly green."