Perfume 101: 517 posts

Walking through the fragrance aisles of Sephora makes me feel as if I am browsing through a Hello magazine with the names like Britney Spears, J.Lo, Paris Hilton, and Kimora Lee Simmons popping before my eyes. However, I am selecting the fragrances labeled with names famous for things that are only tangentially related to fashion and fragrance on purpose. Currently, there is a strong trend for celebrity fragrances, with new offerings coming up what seems like every week. From Celine Dion to Nicole Richie and Maria Sharapova, celebrity status and perfume come hand in hand. From a perfume industry perspective, any brand capable of selling fragrance is welcomed, given the changes in its business model and the high rate of competition. The number of releases is increasing each year, with the consumers exhibiting less and less loyalty to a single scent. While the number of new fragrances in the 1950s were around 10-20 per year, with the average market life of a product around 15-20 years, in the recent decade, there are close to 150-200 launches each year, with the market life averaging 3!

I cannot help but feel a bit of reticence, especially in light of the fact that I have no particularly strong desire for any specific celebrity perfume, simply because it bears a famous name. Should I happen to dislike the celebrity in question, then I might be less eager to try their perfume. However, are such pre-conceived notions justified? In order to answer this question, I stand in front of fragrance shelves in Sephora resolutely glancing past Annick Goutal and Bvlgari to try Alan Cumming The Fragrance and Britney Spears Fantasy. I briefly contemplate a blind testing, however for the sake of preserving a sane appearance, I decide that an open mind shall do. …

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What sparked your love for perfume? My own passion for scent is a journey with no end in sight, yet I can attribute three main factors to its inception: Diorissimo, Chemistry and Trésor.

As Nabokov noted in Mary, “Nothing revives the past as completely as the smell.” If my early memories had a scent, they would be redolent of Diorissimo, lilies of the valley blossoming on a misty spring morning. Diorissimo was my mother’s favorite fragrance, its little pink box with black and white checks concealing a small bottle of extrait de parfum. She worked at the chemical engineering research institute, which was an organization with a very vague purpose. Or perhaps, it is just my confused memory, because what I recall of the institute had little to do with either chemistry or engineering. Yet, imagining my glamorous mother trailing a scent of Edmond Roudnitska’s legendary creation down the halls of that dingy grey building never fails to amuse me. She would drop me off at the pre-school and then leave, yet the scent of her would remain.

That veil of scent leaving an imprint upon the memory is what I wanted to have as well. However, it was a specific veil, differing from the cloud of “Krasnaya Moskva” my school teacher would force upon me when chastising for a lack of interest in the pioneer activities. It was also completely unlike a wave of “Shipr” cologne one would notice when passing a careening drunkard. “Shipr” (chypre in Russian) was often a drink of choice for the Soviet alcoholics when vodka was not in stock (and yes, it took a long time to overcome my prejudice towards chypre genre.) The scent I was craving was ethereal and elegant, a blend of white flowers and crushed leaves. I would surreptitiously dab on my mother’s Diorissimo before my ballet classes, feeling elegant and ethereal myself (despite whatever mirrors told).

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