What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [87]
Rage Against the Machine
When the English perfumer Eugene Rimmel created the first mass-marketed perfumes in the mid-1800s, he also invented various ways of promoting them through scented print advertising. He gave away scented almanacs and scented fans. He placed scented ads in London theatre programs. These efforts were not met with universal applause. His sophisticated contemporaries turned up their noses at the theatre programs; these aromatic momentos of “rank commercialism” were seen as intrusive, crass, and annoying. The equivalent in our time are scented perfume ads in magazines. Calvin Trillin has inveighed against the ones he found in Vanity Fair; they “revived old thoughts about whether the Drafters could have envisioned the possibility that the freedom of expression guaranteed in the First Amendment would someday extend to smelling up the place.”
The scented ads that offend Mr. Trillin are the legacy of Fred and Gale Hayman, the California entrepreneurs who started the Giorgio of Beverly Hills boutique on Rodeo Drive. In 1982 they launched a marketing campaign for a perfume named after their store. They began by mailing perfume-soaked blotters to their local clients, but to get samples under noses on a national scale they needed a cheaper method. Their ad for Giorgio, in the May 1983 Vogue, was the first ever to use the ScentStrip Sampler, a new product from Arcade Marketing. This was the now-familiar printed page with a glued-down flap; as the flap is pulled open, microdroplets of fragrance oil in the glue are ruptured and scent is released. Readers complained that the magazine reeked of Giorgio, but sales boomed and the magazine industry never looked back. (Determined to reach even more nostrils, the Haymans unleashed the Spritzer Ladies from Hell, teams of white-and-yellow-jacketed reps who aggressively misted millions of people in department stores.) The Giorgio perfume, formulated with an extraordinarily high ratio of fragrance oil to alcohol, was brassy, penetrating, and easily recognized. Fancy restaurants banned it, and wearers caused near-riots in elevators across the country. Giorgio-bashing became a snob sport. Outside of Le Cirque and the refined precincts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, however, the perfume was a blockbuster.
Scented print ads are enjoying a new renaissance at the moment. Fox-Walden Films recently paid $110,000 to run a scented full-page movie ad in the Los Angeles Times. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are said to be considering rub-and-smell ads. Each year the annual report of spice maker McCormick & Company features a different aroma; in 2006 a disappointingly thin nutmeg rendition struggled to be noticed above the stink of the ink. A cover of the German scientific journal Angewandte Chemie smelled like lily of the valley, in order to draw attention to an article on odor receptors. The core market for scented ads has always been women’s fashion magazines; the publisher of Allure claims that 85 percent of her readers immediately try the scent strips in her book.
Among some social critics, scented ads inspire violent imagery; words like “assault” and “bombardment” get thrown around. To the journalist Emma Cook, consumers are helpless victims: “Whereas you can exercise the choice to stop listening or watching, physically you can’t help smelling things.” Artificial scents