Smell the money

Wearing scent is one of life’s pleasures. Humans have been dousing themselves in concoctions of olfactive molecules since at least the Bronze Age, and any habit that persistent has to have something going for it. Yet it does seem odd that most of the time we mask our own, genetically unique smell with others so widely available you can catch a whiff of them in cities across the planet: Opium on the streets of Barcelona, Eternity in Istanbul.

Heavily advertised, widely worn perfumes can smell good. But buy one and a fair proportion of your cash will go on its marketing, not on its contents. All those portentous, mini-movie perfume ads—filled with celebrity models running (presumably so they don’t have to spoil the effect by speaking) towards romantic assignations through increasingly rococo sets—don’t come anything close to cheap. Not only this, but such perfumes are vital money-makers for fashion brands, so they are almost without exception made to a price. When profit is put before pong, the results tend to be one-dimensional scents, made of cheap ingredients, that smell the same on everyone. Perhaps most irritating is that this instant recognisability is in fact a bonus for the big manufacturers. It turns you into a walking advert for their product—and unlike those celebrity models, you’re not getting paid.