What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [7]
Another style of perfume guide lists each brand by fragrance family: florals, aldehydics, chypres, and so on. This isn’t much help if you don’t know what a chypre smells like. (The term covers a range of styles having in common a warm, woody character with an animal-like undertone.) If you like Estée Lauder’s Pleasures, you can look up a dozen similar scents. What you won’t find is a measure of how similar they smell. Nor will you find the exact ways they differ from Pleasures—are they stronger, spicier, greener, muskier?
Most people don’t consult a reference book before shopping. They simply head for the department store. But once inside, things don’t get easier. Each fragrance brand has its own counter, attended by its own salesperson who will show you only the perfumes she is paid to show. If your ideal scent is one counter away, it might as well be in a different universe. Sephora stores broke with retail tradition by introducing the “open sell.” Brands are arranged alphabetically on the shelf, from Alan Cummings to Yves Saint Laurent. With no vested interest in any one brand, the Sephora staff is just as happy to sell you Alan as Yves. To introduce sensory logic to their store designs, the company has tried arranging perfumes by fragrance family: orientals here, florals over there. This may be the start of a badly needed rethinking of the retail experience.
Charts and guides, even those based on expert opinion, are still arbitrary views of odor space. They present the world according to one fragrance house, or more likely just its chief perfumer. No single classification has emerged thus far as the industry standard. If one did, it still wouldn’t help the average shopper, because perfumers don’t think like the rest of us. The professional detects rose de mai Bulgarian where the consumer smells flowers. The professional finds clear-cut differences among perfumes that strike most people as indistinguishably fruity-floral. What the average person needs is a map on which brands are arranged by how they smell to other average people.
PERFUME MAKERS speak to the consumer with two voices: Ingredient Voice and Imagery Voice. Here is a classic example of the Ingredient Voice, from a description of Estée Lauder’s best-seller Beautiful (1985):
Vibrantly feminine floralcy of rose, lily, tuberose, marigold, muguet, jasmine, ylang, cassis and carnation accented with fresh mandarin and bright fruity notes. Warm background accord of orris, sandalwood, vetiver, moss and amber.
Ingredient Voice assumes perfumer-level familiarity with more than a dozen raw materials, when in fact few civilians have ever smelled orris root or vetiver. Reciting a list of ingredients gives an illusion of precision. Even perfumers don’t think of Beautiful as a list of ingredients; they might think of it as a big, complex floral type with an ambery warmth. Ingredient Voice doesn’t help the casual shopper.
In contrast, Imagery Voice is all about atmospherics. The drama of seduction, passion, and mystery makes Imagery Voice the natural language of brand marketers and ad agencies. Listen to an actual vice president of marketing discuss a new men’s cologne with a cosmetics industry trade magazine: “It’s intended to target a young, stylish, hip, contemporary kind of guy.” So far, so good. Aging, badly dressed nerds aren’t known for buying a lot of cologne.
“The positioning of [the new brand] is really based all about capturing the pulse and energy of the city.” Reasonable