Jezebel: Perfume

Get A Whiff Of This

Dodai — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:30:00 EST

According to a short piece on BlackBook's website, "Europe's leading Crystal Artist," Emeshel, is launching a line of men’s and women’s fragrances with bottles inspired by male and female genitalia. The ladyflower scent, "Nubia," evokes various fruits and spices, as well as "oil of bergamot." The content of the men's scent, "Rajul" is more mysterious, but you will be "touched by the fragrance of the wet wind and the endless water." Will these fragrances be competition for Vulva, the perfume that's supposed to smell like a vagina? [BlackBook]

The New Power Perfumes: You'll Smell Like Your Mom And Like It

Sadie — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:20:00 EST

Apparently, along with our newfound love of 80's power dressing, we're all enamored of heavy, potent, Reagan-era perfumes, too. You know: Shalimar, Opium, Poison and a bunch of new ones that just smell like them. In general, I'm kind of baffled by these mysterious forces that are supposed to be dictating all our actions, and in this case, particularly so: isn't the way we smell supposed to be kind of, well, personal? And can people stop acting like we've surrendered our individual wills to some kind of creepy demographics genie?

I mean, I get changing your scent by season: there are, after all, some issues of evaporation, and light florals can be incongruous on a wool coat. But I'd always understood from a lifetime of casual fashion mag reading that people were basically attracted to one scent family or the other - floral, woodsy, grassy etc. Yes, there was that period in middle school when everyone wore Gap scents - and later Clinique Happy - but I'd always thought one of the lesser pleasures of adulthood was discovering a closer olfactory match to one's personality and sticking to it.

According to the Los Angeles Times,"these aren't light-and-fruity times. You can smell the gravitas in the air — and on the wrists of stylish women all over. Serene florals and cheery citrus fragrances in the family of Prescriptives Calyx and Issey Miyake L'Eau d'Issey, which have been en mode since the 1990s, are giving way to headier scents." The new-old ones are heavy on the musk and amber - which, apparently, denote either gravitas or evoke 80's excess. I don't know who these women are whose finger is so on the societal pulse that they feel a compulsion to run out and douse themselves in Shalimar a la Katherine Parker in Working Girl and throw out their frivolous old perfumes. (For my part, I choose to, ahem, increase societal stability by sticking to my usual - Frederic Malle's En Passant (for business situations and meeting parents) or the slightly sultrier Lys Mediteranee.)

I mean, people can obviously wear whatever perfume they want — even if I'm kind of baffled by the woman who says, "I'll suffer through the first two hours of a perfume being overbearing because I want it to last all day," — but I'm kind of sick of hearing lately about how we're theoretically being pushed and pulled in all directions by the cosmos. Yes, the economy is beyond our control, and is indeed effecting most spheres of our lives. But it has not stripped us of individual tastes and opinions and preferences. No magic hand is altering our skirt length while we sleep or forcing men with curvaceous girlfriends into the arms of the more muscular ideal to which they allegedly cleave in times of economic stress. There is enough out of our hands right now without some sinister force also spraying Opium on our wrists.

New Fragrances Catch The Scent Of Classics From Decades Past [LA Times]

Grim Fairy Tales

Dodai — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:40:00 EDT

Paris Hilton has a new fragrance, Fairy Dust, and the advertisement for the perfume is like a twisted dream. Since when do fairies wear gold lamé bikini tops from American Apparel? The copy asks, "Do you believe in fairy tales?" Um, like the one where the princess got everything she wanted and overstayed her welcome in the public eye? Sure. (Click to enlarge.) [The Sun]

Photoshop Of Horrors

Dodai — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:40:00 EDT

Christina Aguilera has a new fragrance, Inspire, and it seems the art department may have been inspired to give her an unbelievably tiny waist. Christina's shape is lovely! Why does her middle need to be whittled down to the width of her neck (à la Scarlett Johansson on the cover of Cosmo)? It's disturbing. Click to enlarge; and to see a side-by-side comparison of Christina with an unretouched paparazzi photo.

The Sweet Smell Of Success

Sadie — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:20:00 EDT

Hey, if Jessica Simpson can have a fragrance, why not Jessica Dunne? The Chicago artist, who had no experience in the beauty industry, spent about $100,000 of her own money to produce "Ellie," "a quaint floral heavy on lily of the valley" based on her memories of her grandmother. Her success story is the definition of "heartwarming," from her childhood perfume bottle collection to the family focus group to the hand-tied bits of grosgrain ribbon on the little faceted bottles. The buyer at Bendel's who took a chance on Dunne "had a hunch that her clients would respond to the brand story." They did: although the perfume retails for $180, it's sold well enough that Dunne is launching a second scent. Maybe the time is right for a celeb-fragrance backlash: amateur perfumers, wave of the future? We smell a business op... [NYT]

I am generally ashamed of my weakness for ...

Moe — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:30:00 EDT

I am generally ashamed of my weakness for those "what's in your bag" features, since they sort of represent the basest forms of useless information purveying/commodity fetishism, but. Sometimes they offer exotic little ripples of texture — sort of like Bumble & Bumble Surf Spray, only without the ensuing dreadlocks — as the July Marie Claire's exploration into the contents of Kristen Bell's beach tote demonstrates. Click the pic for more worldly possessions, and be sure not to miss #8.

Jovan White Musk: "This makes me picture the Polaner All-Fruit commercial where the country bumpkin is having breakfast with high society types and he says: "Will you please pass the jelly?", and the old lady faints." [Perfume of Life]
On another musky note: Something Stinks

Afghanistan is known for its heroin production, ...

Maria — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:40:00 EDT

Afghanistan is known for its heroin production, and the weak post-Taliban government does little to stop the growing, illegal industry. However, a group of foreign and Afghan businessmen are hoping to influence poppy farmers to grow flowers for perfume instead of drugs. The men are met with resistance, both from the poppy farmers and the corrupt Afghan government, which asks for bribes and stalls production during peak harvesting times. The lack of enthusiasm from the farmers could reflect the difficulties of dealing with a legal business in a weak government, especially when they can grow illegal poppy flowers with more ease. Sure, the beauty industry isn't so great, but is it so wrong to want to have a legal business, and make people smell good in the process? [NPR]

How Do You Describe Something You Can't See, Feel, or Hear?

Dodai — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:00:00 EDT

So there's a story by Jim Lewis on Slate about perfume. Not just about perfume, though — about writing about perfume. The story is linked to a book called Perfumes: The Guide, by husband and wife team Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. I used to write about music, which I always thought was really tough; somehow the vocabulary ("upbeat, sing-along, power-pop" or "the songs meandered, looped, tinkled out or built to a dramatic orchestral crescendo") always seemed forced and limited. But describing a scent seems even more challenging. Lewis points out that the words perfumers use: amber, citrus, floral — are pretty vague. But! Luca Turin describes Fracas thusly: "A friend once explained to me how Ferrari achieves that gorgeous red: first paint the car silver, then six coats of red, then a coat of transparent pink varnish..." Can you smell it? Glossy, bright and sharp.

That review is poetic, but the one for Lalique's Le Perfum is more direct: ("Vile, cheap, obnoxiously chemical... I hope to live long enough to see this sort of faceless dreck wiped off the face of the earth. Nice bottle.") Some of the reviews get straight to the point ("The bathrooms in hell smell like this.") and others invoke vivid imagery ("a shrill little floral that feels like music heard through someone else's headphones") but one in particular caught Lewis' eye: It's for a perfume called Sacrebleu:

"If you travel at night on Europe's railways, near big stations you can sometimes see lights the size a teacup nestled between the rails, shining the deepest mystical blue-purple light through a filthy Fresnel glass. They appear to be permanently on, suggesting that the message they convey the train driver is an eternal truth. Since childhood I have fancied the notion that it may not be a trivial one like 'Buffers ahead' but something numinous and unrelated to duty, perhaps 'Life is beautiful' or some such. Sacrebleu has the exact feel of those lights, a low hum that may be eclipsed by diurnal clamor but rules supreme when, at 3 a.m., you know you're looking into your true love's eyes even though you can't see them."

Yeah, so the perfume smells good. One can assume. But here's a question: Have you ever purchased a fragrance after reading about it? Can reading about a perfume make you want to buy it? And how would you describe your favorite scent? (Bonus if you don't use the words "clean" or "fresh".) Or do you just judge a perfume by its bottle?

The Sweet Smell of Success [Slate]

Smell Ya Later

maria — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:40:00 EDT

Do you have a few bottles of overwhelmingly musty perfume lying around? Now you can use them as weapons! A woman in Corpus Christi, Texas warded off a captor by spraying him with Elizabeth Arden Red Door perfume. The captor tricked the woman into stopping her car by lying down in the middle of the road and then forced her at knife point to "drive him around the city" before stealing $80 and a cell phone and getting doused in flowery amber water. Apparently the man had no problem risking his life by lying down in front of a moving vehicle, but smelling like a member of the Golden Girls was enough to make him flee. [UPI]

Dark Matter, Light Reading!

Moe — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:45:50 EST

"'Please leave me alone. ... This is a very hard time for me,'" he said as he threw his arms up and wept. WSJ]
Dark Matter, a Meryl Streep movie about an Asian campus shooter delayed following the Virginia Tech killings, is finally set to be released. [WSJ]
We have 11-year-old sex offenders in this country now. [MyFoxDFW]
And Kimora Lee Simmons Barbies. [NY Mag]
What happens when a pharmaceutical sales rep copies and pastes the Match.com profile of a Harper's writer? A somewhat awkward date! [WSJ]
Too. Fucking. Sad. [LA Times]
Oh my GOD and if you think that is bad you won't BELIEVE what's happening to this critical American industry. [NYT]
Hillary and John McCain had a vodka drinking contest with Hillary when the two were in Estonia a few years back but Barry Hussein asked for his shot glasses to be filled with water. Islamofascist! [NY Times]

US Weekly made an awesome slide show of celebrity couples of yore, including that woman Patrick Dempsey married that one time and Tom Cruise and Heather Locklear. [Us]
"In a rare display of political hypocrisy, a longtime Republican lawmaker has resigned today after child pornography was found on his computer." [Wonkette]
Whither Texas? Uh... [Slate]
Barack Obama has a lot of money and John McCain doesn't so John McCain is trying to get Obama to agree to some pinko income distribution scheme that he purportedly agreed to a long time ago. Socialism's a bitch, Barry! [NYT]
"And no I'm not a regular reader of 'Jezebel.' I got this link from Defamer. I swear." [The Weekly Standard]

Drowning In Perfume? You Might Be Depressed

dodai — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:30:00 EST

Researchers from Tel Aviv University recently discovered a link between depression and the olfactory glands. "Our scientific findings suggest that women who are depressed are also losing their sense of smell, and may overcompensate by using more perfume," explains Professor Yehuda Shoenfeld. The good news? "People who are depressed seem to respond well to aromatherapy. Certain smells seem to help them overcome the effects of the biological factors, suggesting that depression may have a biological cause." Dr. Shoenfeld suggests that a standardized "smell test" cold be developed so that doctors could diagnose depression and other autoimmune diseases. Haven't you always suspected the aroma of fresh-baked brownies was a miracle cure?

Dr. Shoenfeld has studied lupus, arthritis and rheumatism, and found that depression accompanying lupus is not just an emotional reaction to being sick — it appears to have a biological cause. The fact that sense of smell and depression can be linked, however, should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever been depressed. Not only do you cease to feel, taste or smell, you might even stop seeing colors. Some of us know, because, once we were treated for depression, we were absolutely astonished at how the world was suddenly quite pretty and brightly-hued. What is surprising? That there might be a low-tech, ancient way to treat mood disorders. "I think that science is able to show that aromatherapy might not be just for quacks," Dr. Shoenfeld says. "After all, some of these remedies have been used since the time of the Egyptians to treat organic diseases." Bring on the grapefruit-scented candles!

Wearing Too Much Perfume May Indicate Depression [Science Daily]
Why Some Depressed Girls Can't Smell The Roses [EurekAlert]

Get A Whiff Of This

dodai — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:45:00 EST

John Brady, a columnist for Folio: magazine, has declared that magazine scent strips stink. He writes that the perfume or cologne ads in magazines "all smell alike" and make the entire publication smell "like the men's bathroom between innings at Fenway Park." His way of dealing with them is to rip them out, put them in a trash bag and then "seal the trash bag tightly so that the scents don't contaminate the room." He also warns, "Whatever you do, don't run these strips through your shredder," claiming you'll be stuck with the scent for at least three years. Here's a question: Have you ever rubbed a scent strip on your wrist or hand and liked the way it smelled? And has any one ever purchased a fragrance because they sniffed it in a magazine? [Folio:]

Celebrity Scents: Cold Hard Cash With A Top Note Of Shamelessness

Dodai — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:00:00 EDT

Worldwide sales of the top ten celebrity scent lines totaled $353.6 million last year, reports Forbes. Heading the pack as top-seller was Sean John Unforgivable, the signature scent of Sean "Diddy" Combs — with a $74.9 million in sales. Celebs, writes Lauren Sherman, team up with cosmetics companies who produce the fragrance and then "slap the star's name on the bottle." But Diddy was personally involved with his deal with Estée Lauder, stresses Diana Espino, general manager of Sean John Fragrances. He came up with a concept, tested different scents and eventually began starring in print and online ads. The deals pay off: Celebrities give the scents attention, and stars get a cut of the sales, between 5% and 10%. Jennifer Lopez's last CD and last few movies were flops, but sales of her different fragrances totaled $77 million in 2006. (She has a fifth scent set for release in February.) And even though Britney's personal life is a mess, her perfumes, Curious and Fantasy, made $84 million last year.

What's up with that? Sociologist Henrik Vejlaard says, "It takes a lot of money to make a designer perfume well-known these days. Perfumers benefit financially from names that are very famous already." Yeah, and now we have Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B., Mariah Carey's M, Sarah Jessica Parker's Covet, Britney's Believe, Usher's Usher and Kate Moss' Kate Moss (coming to the US in 2008) to look forward to.

Although some of us totally do not get the celeb-fragrance thing (not even Liz Taylor's White Diamonds, which had $60 million in sales last year), senior beauty analyst Karen Grant says that a scent must have "winning juice" — in other words, it's gotta smell good. But seriously, what is it about celebs that moves perfume? Do people really think that the stars, aside from Paris Hilton, wear their own stuff? Does it strike you as odd that people will buy something because Diddy likes the way it smells? Does anyone else remember, that in the days of Destiny's Child, Beyoncé said she was allergic to perfume? That didn't stop her from releasing her Tommy Hilfiger-licensed scent, True Star! And with so many celebs launching their aromas on the world, what's next? Are we going to live in a world that has Eau De Hills? Eau de Heidi Montag? Please, please say it ain't so.

Best-Selling Celebrity Scents [Forbes]
Related: What Do Gay Men Think Of Vulva, The Ladyparts Perfume?

Are Women Really Going To Want M By Mariah Carey?

Tracie — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:30:00 EDT

The commercial for M by Mariah Carey, the singer's signature fragrance, debuted on Friday. The same Loch Ness Monster image that appeared in the print ads shows up, which admittedly, we sort of like just because it's so fucking weird and unattractive. The rest of the ad though is erotic in a Harlequin novel sort of way, with flashes of flesh. Also, you walk away with the idea that the scent smells like her cleavage. Are women supposed to wanna buy this stuff?

Sarah Jessica Parker's 'Covet': Do. Not. Want.

Tracie — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:45:00 EDT

This commercial for Sarah Jessica Parker's new fragrance Covet gives us second-hand embarrassment. Whereas the tagline for her first perfume, 'Lovely', went for "enchanting," Covet's ad aims for "bewitching," but really we just end up with witch, and we can't help but think of her abrasive look in Hocus Pocus. The googly-eyed close up at the end is really creepy, but not as creepy as the fact that digital correction has erased every line on her face. We guess that when it comes to perfume, people don't like the smell of crow's feet.

Sarah Jessica Parker Beauty

'Vulva': The Perfume Of The Panty-Minded

Tracie — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:30:00 EDT

When we first discovered the fragrance Vulva, the "beguiling vaginal scent," we thought it was some sort of weird German art project. But no! It's a legit business that bottles pussy stank in those '80s Less Than Zero cocaine vials and calls itself not a perfume but a "smelling substance for your own pleasure." The FAQ on its site reminds us that Vulva is not suitable for anyone under 18, and that it should not come in contact with mucous membranes. Watch the video/commercial here. (NSFW)

Vulva Original [Vulva]

Mariah Carey's Perfume Ad Stinks

Tracie — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:30:00 EDT

The official ad for M by Mariah Carey, Mimi's signature fragrance, was finally released, after fake ads were making the blog rounds last month. Uh, we know this is "official" but it still looks pretty fucking fake. She could be a character from that entirely CGI'd movie Beowulf. Like, has she ever looked like that? Anyway, we totally knew the real ad would involve butterflies somehow. It's available for sale this week at $62.50 for a 3.3 oz bottle. According to the site, the scent "opens with an indulgent creamy accord and blooms into an opulent floral heart [that] will linger in your mind like a timeless melody." We hope the melody is "Breakdown" featuring Bones Thugs-N-Harmony. (Click headline for full-size image.)

"M by Maria Carey" Ad [Maria Daily]

We Love The Smell Of Celebrity Baby In The Morning

Dodai — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:30:47 EDT

The Washington Post reports that a jewelry, fashion, and fragrance designer with a background in human-rights law named Symine Salimpour has a new scent called Shiloh. She began developing the fragrance more than a year before Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt bestowed that name upon their daughter. Last year, Jolie filed a legal challenge to block the use of the name, but dropped the charge about a month ago. So, what does Shiloh smell like? "It is a complex fragrance," a writer explains. "The forward notes, the ones that hit your nose first, are cedar wood and patchouli. Rising above that earthy base are delicious whiffs of citrus (thanks to a dab of bergamot oil) and rose petals."

Shoppers should note that 5% of the profits will go to an Israeli-based nonprofit organization benefiting disabled children. Salimpour does not hold a grudge against Jolie, noting she and Jolie both "believe in human rights and love Brad Pitt!" Meanwhile, over here in the Jezebel lab, we're developing 'Maddox', a playful fragrance that smells precocious and experimental with coy, exotic Asian notes, a hint of temper tantrum and a soupçon of sibling rivalry.
'Shiloh'" A Baby And A Perfume [Washington Post]