Article Archive
She’s lost control again
7 April, 2013
I’ve started introducing myself to some of the professionals in the perfume industry, which so far has been really encouraging: everyone’s said positive things about The Sniff Box, but just one comment caught me slightly up short.
I’d been talking to someone who I guess you could call an important player in the perfume world. She’d been complimentary about my attempts to write about perfume in a straightforward, easily accessible way, but when I asked her what she thought of my illustrations, she paused then said, ‘I think you could find that some of the perfume companies might have a problem with them.’
In fact none of the brands I’ve talked to so far have ‘had a problem’ with them, but I thought that was such an interesting thing to say, and rather revealing too.
Perfume brands, just like their compatriots (and sometimes owners) in the fashion world, spend vast amounts of money and effort on creating an image for their brand, which often disguises the fact that there’s really very little to distinguish one brand from the next. So much of the perfume and fashion industry’s profits, in the end, are about mystique, and mystique is a fragile and evanescent thing.
Brand building is all about control, in the end: control of your brand’s image, and anything that might dent that image in any way is a threat – which is why big brands are often so litigious.
The problem (looked at from a brand-manager’s point of view) is that little thing called freedom of expression. You can police your brand as fiercely as the KGB, but once it’s out in the public domain there’s little you can do about people’s opinions apart from muttering vague threats and taking legal action if they do something rude with your logo.
It’s all very Wizard of Oz, when you come to think of it. You remember how (plot spoiler warning!) the wonderful wizard is finally revealed to be a very unimpressive little man cranking away on a lot of levers, all hidden away behind a curtain?
Most branding works on exactly the same smoke-and-mirrors principle, and a lot of brands are terrified that the rest of us (the consumers, as we’re so dismissively called) might one day see behind the curtain and realise how we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes. Ideally they’d prefer us to repeat what they say about their products and always to use the pictures they provide – which is why, I think, I was told that drawing perfume bottles might be ‘a problem’.
But actually I think that seeing behind the curtain is a great thing, as long as there’s something interesting behind it. And I also think that the more people know about something, the more interested in it they’re likely to be. Create a great brand and great products and brand managers have nothing to fear.
When ignorance is bli$$
15 December, 2012
Choosing a new fragrance is a tough experience at the best of times, mainly because of the way that almost all perfume is currently sold – in the cacophonous, distracting, high-pressure sales environment of a department store, duty-free shop or (in Britain) a bigger branch of Boots. When it comes to finding the right perfume for you, what you really need most of all is lots of time – time to compare different fragrances; time to discover how they change over an hour or two on your skin; time, more than anything else, to think.
That’s hard enough when there’s a salesgirl on commission standing at your elbow saying ‘Have you tried the new * * * * * ?’ and attempting to spritz you with something that would probably work quite well as a fly-spray for cows. But it’s struck me that there’s something else you need if you’re ever going to start building up a half-way decent idea of the perfume landscape, with all its peaks and troughs. And that is lots of money.
Now we all know that perfume isn’t cheap, and we’re perfectly well aware that its price rarely reflects the cost of its production, even when you factor in expensive marketing campaigns and the inflated fees of cocaine-crazed copywriters. In some perverse way it’s actually part of perfume’s appeal, giving it an aura of exclusivity even though the more sensible part of our brain knows that it’s actually decanted from vast vats in anonymous factories somewhere in New Jersey.
That’s fine, maybe, if you’re the kind of person who buys perfume once a year for Christmas or your birthday. But what if you want to build up a useful reference collection? That’s going to take deeper pockets than most of us have, or years of slow accumulation. Small wonder that so few people feel confident about making an informed choice: how can they unless they’ve smelled a lot of other perfumes so they’ve got something to compare a new one with?
Over the years I’ve bought plenty of perfume of my own, and let’s say (for the sake of argument) that I’ve got around a hundred different bottles now. Given that a low average price for a bottle of scent must be at least £50, that’s a minimum of £5,000 worth of perfume sitting on my shelves, and conceivably much more.
At the same time there seems to be something of a price war going on between the major perfume brands – but a price war that’s going in the opposite direction to most price wars, in that more and more brands are launching what marketeers probably call ‘super-premium’ scents, with even more exorbitant prices than the general run of so-called ‘premium’ fragrances. And this in the middle of a recession that’s leaving many of us feeling anxiously out of pocket. What on earth is going on?
I really don’t have much idea, but my real point is this: if the majority of people can’t afford to buy many different scents, how can they ever be expected to become as informed consumers as they may be, say, about wine – another ‘premium’ product, but one whose costs are so much lower? It’s almost as if the perfume companies would prefer their customers to remain in not-so-blissful ignorance so they can sell them whatever old rubbish they choose to spend their marketing budget on that month. But surely that couldn’t be true?
The perversity of perfume
24 November, 2012
Few things feel as self-indulgent as dousing yourself in perfume (or just dabbing a few drops behind your ears), and most people would agree that buying perfume, too, is a pretty self-indulgent activity. But actually I want to make the case that when you spray a fragrance on you’re also doing a social service.
How? Well, one of the odd – if slightly annoying – things about perfume is that it doesn’t take long for you to stop smelling it on yourself. Your nose quickly becomes so accustomed to it that, after the first few minutes, it’s rare for you to notice that you’re wearing perfume at all.
Yet perfume can last for ages on the skin, and even longer if you spray it on your clothes. Which means that hours after you’ve put it on, other people can enjoy a scent you can no longer smell for yourself. And what could be less self-indulgent than that?
Obscurity vs. celebripongs
30 October, 2012
What makes a perfume desirable? Why do we buy what we buy? I think it depends on what kind of person we are, or rather how much we know.
Take the person who doesn’t know much about perfume at all. If you don’t know much then you’re likely to buy whatever scent is being most heavily marketed that month, for where else are you going to get your information? Certainly not from the vacuously rehashed press-releases that count as perfume ‘journalism’ in the majority of magazines.
That might sound like a bad thing, and given the number of awful fragrances out there, on the whole it probably is. But then you have to remember that while it might mean that millions of people are buying the latest celebripong, Chanel No.5 remains the single most heavily marketed perfume on earth, so it’s not necessarily all bad news. The drawback, of course, is that you generally end up smelling like everyone else.
Next step up are those of us (and I count myself among their number) who know their Millionaire from their Mitsouko. We’re perfume enthusiasts, we’ve read our Luca Turin, we love the classics and trying new things, but we really want to stand out from the crowd.
So the perfect perfume for us is something that is, ideally, made by an obscure little company with a funny name, or (even better) is a classic fragrance that has long been discontinued or is no longer available in our country, though fortunately we know where we can still get our hands on a bottle or two. Christian Dior’s Jules, anyone? (Yes please.)
But I suspect there’s still another level above this, a kind of perfume nirvana, rarely achieved except by those fortunate few whose olfactory sense is sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish dross from gold. These higher beings can – and here I can only guess – somehow blank out the ads, the breathless copywriting and all the other extraneous noise that deafens most of us to the only thing that really matters in the end: the smell.
It’s as hard to smell a perfume with an open mind as it is to look at a well-known painting or listen to a famous piece of music with an open eye or ear. But surely it’s an ideal to aim towards, even if you end up wearing Guerlain one day and Lady Gaga the next.
Boiling perfume
21 August, 2012
You might not think that central-heating boilers would teach you much about perfume, but I’ve just learned a bit more about the subject from mine. My boiler has been playing up again, so Nick, the nice Cypriot heating engineer, came round to fiddle with my thermistors, and while he was here he noticed all the perfume bottles in the room.
It turns out that Nick is into his perfume too, and he asked why I kept all my perfumes in their boxes, which he thought was a bit weird. ‘That’s the first thing I do when I get home,’ he said, ‘unwrap them and throw away all the packaging. I like the designs of the bottles, and you want to look at those not the cardboard boxes, don’t you?’
It’s a good point, and I suspect that most blokes do exactly the same as Nick and keep their perfume bottles on display. Yet your bathroom is a terrible place to keep perfume, especially once it’s been taken out of its packaging. Bathrooms tend to be warm and humid, for starters, and that doesn’t do much for a fragrance’s shelf life.
Worse still is if (unlike mine) they have a window, for nothing makes perfume degrade faster than bright daylight. Direct sunshine is worst of all. Combine that with heat and, within days, your expensive new purchase will start coming apart at the seams. It’s a process you may not – initially at least – be able to smell, but it’s easy enough to see, for as perfume degrades its colour becomes appreciably darker. Soon enough it won’t smell very nice either.
So the moral of the story is – keep your perfume in its packaging. OK, so it’s a shame not to be able to admire a well-designed bottle every day, but it’s the contents you’ve spent all that money on, and surely that’s worth looking after? Oh yes, and even if Nick didn’t know much about perfume preservation, he did a grand job on my boiler.
Perfume bollocks
7 August, 2012
There’s a lot of it about.
If most of us have trouble getting a handle on perfume it’s not, I think, because we’re too stupid to understand it. In fact the problem isn’t us, but the perfume companies themselves (or at least the companies they employ to do their marketing).
For to enter the world of perfume is to enter a land where English is no longer English but something else entirely – let’s call it Scentish. Here’s a recent example (I’ll let you guess the actual perfume)…
‘Amidst the emotions of an extraordinary journey, the Orient Express races through dreams. It is the quintessence of refinement on which time has no hold… A time traveller and space explorer. A man of today, in keeping with the memories of yesterday’s adventurers…
‘Seductive, brilliant, classic and refined, he discovers a fragrance that reflects him. An homage to his confident, proud masculinity.’
I know, I know – it sounds like a bad Mills & Boon novel from 1972. But that’s not all: we haven’t even heard about the perfume itself yet.
‘Violet, only seemingly discreet, reveals its leaf and flower in this scent. Amongst the selected woods stands a prince, a king, the highly prized oud wood, a legendary and sensual oriental note whose resinous balsamic accents create a sensual and carnal smoky facet.’
Copywriting this bad is almost an art form in its own right, but it does nobody any favours. It tells us nothing about the perfume. It perpetuates the myth that it’s almost impossible to describe scent successfully in words.
Perhaps worst of all, though, it’s press releases like these that all too often find their way into the magazines and on to the websites that most of us read, thanks to lazy journalists who can’t be bothered to think for themselves.
Is it any wonder that people find perfume confusing, when the industry itself is the worst offender?
What a stink
26 July, 2012
There’s nothing unusual about hating airports, but it only dawned on me recently at Gatwick how much I hate airport duty free shops too. I always feel I should have a look at the hundreds of perfumes on offer in case I stumble across something wonderful and new, but while it’s useful, I guess, to keep an eye on the latest big launches (though who can keep up with them all?), I always stumble out afterwards feeling slightly depressed and very headachy.
My problem? It’s that in all those hundreds of perfumes there are maybe three or four I’d want to buy another time, and they’re nearly always the ones I know and like already. Of all the hundreds of new launches every year, in other words, barely one or two are worth a second sniff, and most of them are (not to mince words) utterly vile.
There are occasional exceptions, but they’re pretty rare, and often unexpected: Paco Rabanne Black XS for Men, for example, which is ridiculously sweet but enjoyably silly and smells of strawberries (though it’s actually based on a variation on orange); or Marc Jacobs Bang – hideous advertising, hideous bottle, but actually not such a bad scent inside. But mostly it’s sniff and recoil in horror: why does anyone buy this stuff? Just because they’re told to? It doesn’t seem to make sense.
There again, maybe it was always this way: apart from sad exceptions it’s the good, on the whole, that tends to survive, while the rubbish and the dreadful is quietly dropped and disappears. And perhaps it was just the same in the 1920s or the 1950s. The difference, today, is that there are far too many launches, the industry having backed itself into an unprofitable corner where only the latest thing sells, but only because it’s the latest thing – and it’s all too quickly superseded.
The job-interview fragrance
20 July, 2012
I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue last week when I noticed, just ahead of me, a young woman standing outside the lobby of some fairly swanky offices. As I got closer, she reached into her handbag and produced one of those slimline canisters of scent, which she proceeded to spray all over herself like a crop duster until a cloud of foul-smelling perfume drifted across the entire street.
It was only at this point that it struck me how dressed- and made-up she was, and the thought crossed my mind that she must be going for an interview – in which case pity the poor interviewers. I spent the rest of the morning wondering what effect reeking of bad perfume might have on one’s chances.
If there’s a moral to the story (other than move fast if you ever see anyone getting a scent spray out of their bag), perhaps it’s that perfume, if it doesn’t exactly maketh the man, certainly maketh a bigger impression than one might imagine. I can’t imagine many blokes carry their favourite fragrance around with them, but choosing the right perfume for an important occasion is just as crucial for a man as for a woman. Get it wrong and you could ruin your chances.
Discretion may be the better part of valour, but it’s also a good guide when choosing a perfume for a job interview. The easy way out would be not to wear perfume at all, but wearing a really good but understated classic fragrance does wonders for one’s self-confidence – and can also make a good impression on other people, often without them even knowing why.
As far as fragrances go, it’s hard to beat something that embodies old-fashioned masculinity, such as Guerlain’s Vetiver. For something a bit warmer I’d choose Chanel’s Pour Monsieur, not least because it’s actually quite hard to overdo it. It’s a lovely discreet perfume, but if you’re feeling flush then the same company’s delicious, slightly lavendery Eau de Cologne is even finer – though as someone said to me the other day, ‘It’s a lovely cologne, but if I was going to spend that much money I’d buy something a bit more unusual.’
Fair enough – but surely it’s better to invest in a great fragrance than saving your money and smelling like fabric conditioner? Just remember that poor deluded girl on Shaftesbury Avenue. I wonder if she got the job?