FINDING THE VALUE IN PERFUME
Buy a bottle of perfume and you could pay as much for itsadvertising as its contents. The Sceptical Shopper sniffs out some nichealternatives ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012
Wearing scent is one of life’s pleasures. Humanshave been dousing themselves in concoctions of olfactive molecules since atleast the Bronze Age, and any habit that persistent has to have something goingfor it. Yet it does seem odd that most of the time we mask our own, geneticallyunique smell with others so widely available you can catch a whiff of them incities across the planet: Opium on the streets of Barcelona, Eternity inIstanbul.
Heavily advertised, widely worn perfumes can smell good. But buy oneand a fair proportion of your cash will go on its marketing, not on itscontents. All those portentous, mini-movie perfume ads—filled withcelebrity models running (presumably so they don’t have to spoil theeffect by speaking) towards romantic assignations through increasingly rococosets—don’t come anything close to cheap. Not only this, but such perfumes arevital money-makers for fashion brands, so they are almost without exceptionmade to a price. When profit is put before pong, the results tend to beone-dimensional scents, made of cheap ingredients, that smell the same oneveryone. Perhaps most irritating is that this instant recognisability is infact a bonus for the big manufacturers. It turns you into a walking advert fortheir product—and unlike those celebrity models, you’re not getting paid.
Unfortunately, having a bespoke perfume made just for you will costupwards of £600 for 100ml of eau de parfum (the most concentrated form ofperfume), whereas a similar volume of a globally available brand typicallycosts £70. So it might be worth considering the middle ground—what youmight call niche perfumes, which tend to cost anything from £80-£350 for 100ml.These are produced on a small scale, often by individual “noses” rather thanexisting fashion labels, have a negligible or non-existent advertising spend,and you won’t smell them wafting down every high street.
What, if any, is the actual difference? Most perfumes are acombination of top, middle and bass notes—scented ingredientsranked according to their volatility. Citrus smells, the commonest top notes,are highly volatile and disappear fast. Resinous base-note ingredients, such asmyrrh or benzoin, last for many hours. Notes may be natural, or synthetic; thefinest, hardest-to-harvest natural notes, such as aoud, or Grasse jasmine, cancost, ounce for ounce, more than gold. Don’t turn your nose upat synthetics, however: they can mimic existing smells that can’t becaptured directly—lilac, for instance—or smell, literally, like nothing on earth.
Mass-market perfumes often nab you from the first sniff—they put allthe bang into their top notes, because they want an instant sale. Nicheperfumes are more complicated: like little stories in a bottle, their narrativeunfolds throughout the day as the particular heat and microflora of your skinaffect their layered ingredients. But you have to learn to love them. Withoutexception, of all the niche perfumes I tried for this article, it was those Iat first disliked that most grew on me. When I first dabbed on Juliette Has aGun’s Not a Perfume (£79/100ml), I was nonplussed. Six hours later Iwanted to eat myself. E. Coudray’s Nohiba (£58/100ml)? Cloying and sweet when first on, wonderfullysexy after a few hours. Nez à Nez’s Atelier d’Artiste, £105/100ml? Hated it on the blotter, but loved it on myskin: so complex I felt like I was watching a film. I don’t know aboutyou, but I’d rather watch a film than be an advert.