“I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection…Odors are at once evocative and suggestive, redolent with significance.”
-Â ANDY WARHOL
“Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they’ve got. I never look at anything else— I don’t snoop—but I’m compulsive about seeing if there’s some obscure perfume I haven’t tried yet, or a good old favorite I haven’t smelled in a long time. If I see something interesting, I can’t stop myself from pouring it on. But then for the rest of the evening, I’m paranoid that the host or hostess will get a whiff of me and notice that I smell like somebody-they-know.” – ANDY WARHOL
Warhol, A. (1975). The philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 150.
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“It is said that ‘we are what we eat’—but it is also true that we are what we smell like: fragrant or foul, good or bad.” – Antony Synnott
“Perfumes are the soft-focus lense on our rough daily existence. They are the invisible, user-friendly interface in daily human interaction. They are sheer present – yet we have unearthed their primordial past. They seem pure phenomenon – yet they contain memory, erratic and unpredictable. And although they seem to lend themselves so well to the game of pure simulation, they do have dark and uncanny origins.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
The Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) Skin Deep Database is a prominent go-to for all things health when it comes to cosmetics. Last February, Unilever joined this fragrance disclosure scheme. Accordingly, Unilever announced a bold new initiative to provide detailed information on fragrance ingredients for all products in its multibillion-dollar portfolio of personal care brands, including Dove, Noxzema, Lever 2000 and NEXXUS. The announcement was characterized as a major move that could dramatically alter the personal care and fragrance markets.
Continue reading Ingredient disclosures & stakeholder pluralism
Traditionally, perfumes are bought as a gift by men for women. Today the situation is certainly more divers. And a recent study reveals further insights:
Women do not buy fragrances they like for female friends.
The study is summarized in Business Insider:
Science has uncovered an unspoken etiquette about women and their perfume | Business Insider
“Researchers have found out by accident that women don’t buy perfume for other women and they won’t share the one they use themselves.â€
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Once in a while the glamorous world of bespoke perfumes gets featured in the important papers.
Individuals who want to be successful in today’s career landscape have to go beyond solid performance and strong results; personal branding is an increasingly important factor as well. Impression management plays a key role in today’s professional world, and one’s olfactory appearance is an integral part thereof. Which strategies and intentions one wants to achieve with personal scent, however, have only been researched casually, at best, so far.
Thus, the leading German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, recently discussed the use of certain perfumes by representatives of a political youth organization. What message does a user of Tommy Hilfiger perfume want to convey? According to the FAZ this young politician wants to identify himself as a performance oriented achiever who spends his money on clothes that are distinctly designed for this social group.
Continue reading Fragrant Careers? The olfactory presentation of self at the workplace
