Make a statement with your scent

A while back, I was seated in an airport lounge, and an empty seat away, was this middle-aged woman with a strong familiarity that enamoured my olfactory glands.

It is what she was wearing. Not her clothes. I cannot recall how she was fancied up. It is how she smelt. The scent was familiar, bringing back memories of an old flame.

You look familiar, I said. Well, ‘looking familiar’ is better than accosting a total stranger with a declaration that she smells familiar. “Oh, thank you,” she said. “Must have been in Singapore, were you there for the STA seminar,” she asked.

STA what? I have never even been to Singapore! The long and short of it is that her fragrance made it easy to strike a conversation. In my mind, we were no strangers. Such is the power of scent, a great emotional stimulant, one that stays with you longer than a name, face, phrase, touch or taste.

It is this emotional familiarity that departmental stores are known to exploit in the West, where shoppers get enveloped in what is considered mood-enhancing scents like the waft of pastries or brewing coffee to create a sense of happiness that makes you loosen your purse strings.

This got me thinking about perfumes and the subjectivity of scents, a business that feeds a global industry estimated to rake in a whopping $27billion annually!

Smelling good is clearly big business. So big, it has attracted great names in entertainment like Kate Moss, Britney Spears and Sarah Jessica Parker, all of whom have created their fragrances.

Jennifer Lopez is said to have eight brands, while Sean Combs is making money hand over fist from his perfume line which is a collaborative effort with Parlux. His Unforgivable with Estee Lauder reportedly earned him $100 million dollars in 2006. Parlux has celebrity fragrances with artistes like Jay-Z (Gold), Rihanna (Rogue) and Paris Hilton (Dazzle).

The stinker for entrepreneurs and perfumers is pinning down what constitutes a good scent. Like beauty, that is sometimes relegated to the optical impressions of the beholder, scent is similarly in the nose of the smeller.

Finding that perfect scent is as subjective as seeking out a perfect woman. It is a matter of opinion. That is why I have problems with Asiatic perfumes, especially from the Arabian Peninsula, which I find overpowering, almost to the point of asphyxiation, yet there are a lot of ladies and men who are enthralled by the sharp, spicy fragrance.

It is an acquired taste and probably the reason why it is hard to construct a truly universal perfume with a global acceptance. Probably this is why every brand has an array of safe scents, the common unimaginative crisp, clean-smelling, watery and soapy varieties that are supposed to inspire a sense of freshness.

They are lovely, but not ground-breaking. The scents are almost stereotypical, yet the prices vary widely. Perfume houses know that they must have mass-targeted products that are palatable and pleasant, which has led to pervasive fruity floral scents.

What you consider a bad scent does not necessarily make a perfume brand cheap. The cost of perfume is subject to ingredients, marketing and packaging.

Apparently, the fluid in that elegant bottle of de toilette or de Cologne accounts for just three per cent of the production cost. The 97 per cent is taken up by marketing, advertising, packaging and an up to 95 per cent profit margin!

Rihanna’s Rogue

Enterprising perfumers just need to craft unique bottles and stamp them with French-sounding names that conjure an image of poetic sophistication and bump prices to doozy heights that scream exclusivity.

Consider fragrances that require extracts from roots of plants that take up to five years to mature or hyped brands like Rihanna’s Rogue I that sold out hours after its debut, mainly due to the songstress’ great following. Sex really does sell.

Perfume expert and author Chandler Burr has sensationally claimed that celebrity fragrances are dull, short-lived and indistinct, lasting only a few hours because of their ingredients.

“They use cheap ingredients to be more affordable and make more money. They are like buying a cheap, fun dress for a season and then tossing it out,” he says.

A new book by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez titled Perfumes: The Guide, exposes the rot in a review of over 1,200 perfumes with brutal frankness.

“They have good words for Shalimar, Joy and Jo Malone’s Lime Basil and Mandarin. But other brands get contemptuous dismissal.

“They write off 212 from Carolina Herrera as ‘lemon juice in a paper cut.’ Amarige from Givenchy is not spared either. They put it down with one phrase: ‘If you are reading this because it is your darling fragrance, please wear it at home exclusively, and tape the windows shut.’”

 

And if you think wearing Paris Hilton’s Heiress justifies sticking your nose in the air with snooty self-importance, take a moment to let the expert opinion sink in, because that scent is ‘a hilarious vile 50/50 mix of cheap shampoo and canned peaches.’ Their words, not mine.

Unbathed body

Essentially, the primary difference between cheap and expensive perfume is in the construction.

Cheap perfumes have few readily available notes, while expensive ones will have a base, middle and top notes and the ingredients would be rarer and more expensive. But expensive does not necessarily mean the scent is heavenly.

Cheapness or cheapening of scents begins with how, where and when you wear a perfume. If you turn up in an ill-fitting, poorly laundered and creased Brioni suit, the guy standing next to you in a tailored blazer, stitched to fit by a local fundi using an acceptable fabric will look more sophisticated and expensively turned out than you.

So it is with perfumes, under-dressing or over-dressing cheapens the scent and the whole experience. Plus, you should wear something appropriate, I find it hard to hold a conversation with a man doused in sweet, flowery effeminate notes, the cost of the brand notwithstanding.

Just as bad is the over-dresser. If you are not going to swaddle yourself in a toasty overcoat in the sweltering tropical heat, it is bête noire to ‘marinate’ yourself in perfumes, leaving fellow passengers in matatu, colleagues in a meeting or travellers in an airplane’s pressurised cabin 30,000 feet above the ground, gasping for air in your killer fog.

This is how we end up cheapening otherwise very good perfumes. If the objective is to mask the fetid feet and cheese malodour of your unbathed body, then you are going about it all wrong.

Perfumes need a good base that begins with personal grooming. Of course there is always the ironic matter of taking a good bath and then going ahead to spray yourself with what some may consider a monumentally awful foetor!

So, before you screw up your nose and go ‘eeuw that’s a cheap perfume,’ just keep in mind that some guy could be going ‘eau la la’ over the same scent.