| Brief Guide to Buying Perfumes |
|
Elizabeth Taylor remarked, “Success is a great deodorant. It takes away all your past smells.” Regrettably, success does not come in a perfume bottle but is enticingly suggested as the outcome if you choose a particular fragrance– success socially and, often, sexually.
Advertisers, and perfumiers, would have us believe that buying a premium perfume enables us to buy into a certain lifestyle. That is why the price of fragrance has been kept artificially high, a fact well documented and now successfully challenged. L’Oréal, Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Guerlain and Elco (Clinique and Estée Lauder) have recently been fined a total of £32m for price-fixing, by colluding with retailers to maintain the over-inflated prices. The price tag has been so high because perfume is seen as a luxury, an aspirational commodity; we are encouraged to believe that by choosing an ‘exclusive’ – i.e. expensive - perfume we are letting everybody know that we understand success and are comfortable with it. Some people buy perfume for reasons totally unrelated to the scent – they love the iconic shape of the bottle – such as Jean Paul Gaultier’s female torso shaped bottle or the classically shaped Chanel No. 5. Fragrance may be bought because it represents a lifestyle choice and makes a statement on display in the bathroom. However, most people buy perfume, not because they make a selection based on what advertisers suggest they should choose, but because, for them, a smell represents something far more complex – a memory, a reminder or an association. I wore Diorella when a student – a fresh, clean citrus smell. I didn’t wear it because I went into a shop and chose it, or advertisers suggested I should. I wore it because the girl in the next room to me wore it and she was everything I felt I wasn’t at that time – smart, pretty and confident. I wore it throughout my student days and loved the way it made me feel when I put it on – often before an evening out. Now, every time I smell it – usually on someone younger – I am instantly charged with a surge of happy memories of freedom, balmy summer’s evenings and excited anticipation. When I came to London, I shared a flat for a while with someone terrifyingly confident, who truly believed herself beautiful. She wore Paloma Picasso, so, again, I copied her because I thought I might capture something of what she had. It is a heady smell, so much more complex than the innocence and simple charm of Diorella. Friends complemented me on my perfume (or rather my flatmate’s!) and so I felt I had indeed taken on an element of the success and sophistication that, to me, the perfume represented. I was lucky. The perfume I aspired to wearing suited my body’s chemistry. That is not always the case. Years later, an Italian friend wore an American perfume and smelled divine – I searched high and low to find the same scent. When I eventually found it, I recoiled sharply from the smell after testing it – it smelt truly vile on me. It reminded me of when I was a child, and the smell of the hairspray my mother always put on, it seemed, before we got in the car; the smell that inevitably acted as a trigger for yet another unfortunate bout of car-sickness! Serves me right for not having enough imagination to choose my own scent! It also, however, serves as an illustration that perfume can smell very differently from one person to the next. Perfume is, ultimately, a chemical cocktail that reacts with one’s own biological make-up and hormone levels. To be blunt, rose water for one, can be toilet water, of the unpopular variety, to another. A great, and possibly the most common, way of trying new perfume is at the airport. You often have time to kill and feel like treating yourself. What better way to while away the time than trying a fantastically colourful assortment of fragrances at a reduced price. The key is to allow enough time to try the perfume, on yourself and not one of those handy stick things, walk away and let the smell develop. After 10-20 minutes or so you will have more of an idea of how the scent smells on you – provided of course you can remember exactly which perfume is which on the patchwork of scents that you will have inevitably sprayed on every available body part! If you know what you like, the web is a great place for good deals. Try www.perfumeshop.co.uk or www.fragrances.co.uk for some ideas and bargains. Cross-scenting came out of the closet years ago. Women have long been wearing their partner’s perfume, way before Calvin Klein came up with ‘CK One’ a deliberately unisex fragrance. It may have sprung from a romantic desire to be reminded of one’s love, but soon became a fashion choice as well as a choice for its own sake. Men are now comfortable with wearing scent more usually associated with the fairer sex. They no longer feel they have to restrict their olfactory experience to after-shave. Trevor Mitchell, a tenor from New York, is partial to a rose scent from Creed saying his choice has nothing to with “gender, sexuality or any of that”. Surely this has to be a great step forward from the heady days of “All Spice” and Henry Cooper’s “Brut – Splash it all on”! Different scents can represent changing moods, attitudes or time of day, and many of us are buying specific perfumes to reflect or evoke such changes. Inevitably we end up with an armoury of smells with which to face our day. Generally, blends of floral and citrus based fragrances are recommended for casual and daywear such as Allure by Chanel which is oriental and floral or Eternity by Calvin klein, allegedly also floral with white lily and sandlewood. Spicy, woody or warm amber based scents are traditionally reserved for after dark such as Obsession, Devil Woman (I kid you not) or Bvlgari BLV Pour Femme, or Christian Lacroix Bezar Femme, which is sensual, apparently. The publicity and multi-million pound packaging of perfuming has to be taken with a pinch of salt. If the publicity surrounding perfumes is to believed, one would choose Prada by Prada if we want to create an exotic but bewildering time travelling impression as it “intertwines memory, reality and possibility…it is inspired by the past (but) embodies the future” and apparently smells of oranges! For those who want to exude crisp Britishness we should choose Burberry Brit which is” fresh and playful smelling of sweet nutty essences, soothing amber and Tonka bean…” For men, the market place is even more patronising. Men are perceived as aspiring to all things sporty, which may be true as “David Beckham – Instinct” and the new Arsenal 1886 are proving to be best sellers. Eventually, I believe we grow into our perfume. We stop being influenced by what other people are wearing, or bottle shape, or what a brand is trying to persuade us to buy into. We choose a perfume because we like the smell on ourselves, and the way it makes us feel, or even the mood we believe it will encourage us to feel. We may be persuaded to try something new, but on the whole I think men and women come back to the smell that makes them feel good about themselves. For a more in-depth guide to scents and smells, read our guide to the sense of smell. |
| Comments, copyright and linking |
|
Comments on this brief guide would be welcome. Also, please let us know if you do put in a link to this guide from your website and we will try to reciprocate with a link from us to your site.
Copyright: these pages are protected by copyright and reproduction of this material is strictly prohibited. Copyright belongs to Giant Games Limited, owner of the briefguides.co.uk and onlineshopping.co.uk websites. © 1997-2006 Giant Games Limited, but you are welcome to have a link to this webpage. |