STRAND SEDUCTION
The scent of your shampoo is just as considered as – and possibly more powerful than – your perfume. Amy Verner discovers why
The first time I went backstage at Fashion Week was for the Paris haute-couture collections, but I could have been in my mother’s marble bathroom back home. Caught in a swirl of models, photographers and the instantly identifiable scent of L’oréal Paris Elnett Satin Hairspray, I was transported away from the frantic hairstylists, with their arsenal of products, back to the countless times I’d seen – and smelt – my mother mist her hair with the brassy aerosol canister. I remembered the many beloved family trips to Europe (before Elnett was available on our shores), where it would be my mother’s only non-negotiable purchase.
Name-dropped by fashion and film stars alike, Elnett has earned cult status thanks to its non-stick, long-lasting hold and chic female illustration on the elongated can. But the hairspray’s true claim to fame is its scent – a bourgeois, powdery, perfumed smell with aldehydic notes. Though hard to describe, it often draws favourable comparisons to Chanel No.5. It’s a unique scent that stays with you.
Like me, I’m sure you have experienced the link between scent and memory via perfume – it’s biological. The area of the brain in charge of processing our senses is also responsible, in part, for strong emotional memories. So a hair product that is inextricably linked to an enduring scent is something akin to the Holy Grail for beauty companies.
This means that even more than performance, fragrance serves as an entry point to the products we use in our hair. “Teenage girls often go to school with their hair wet; their shampoo is the way they perfume themselves,” says Dawn Goldworm, a New York-based fragrance expert who’s developed scents for perfume powerhouses like Coty and Avon. “Shampoo is a huge part of olfactive identification at that age, so when we, as adults, smell similar products, it brings us right back to high school.”
Scent acts as a built-in word-ofmouth marketing tool. Someone says your hair smells fantastic and you reveal the product responsible. Think back to the time you shopped for a new shampoo; chances are you discreetly lifted the cap to smell the contents. And when you experience a Proustian moment upon sniffing a commuter’s Pantene-infused hair flick on the daily commute, you’re simply connecting a pleasant scent with proper hygiene, says Goldworm. “The association is that your hair is clean, that it’s fresh, that you’ve just showered. All of these things are positive reinforcements based on smell.”
The association may seem arbitrary, but Adrian Corsin, director of haircare development at L’oréal Professionnel in Paris, says that consumer testing suggests a floral-fruity blend
is “the winning combo in terms of communicating both cleanliness and pleasure”. Here, the reason may be a matter of conditioning (not to be confused with conditioner!). The scent of apple rates high in the perception of cleanliness and hygiene. Floral notes have come to connote sophistication. As a result, explains Corsin, the floral-fruity template is pretty much the industry norm, particularly with shampoos. “It’s quite difficult to propose something outside the realm of the floral-fruity code,” he says. As a styling product, Elnett has an advantage over these constraints. “You can be more sophisticated and adventurous,” says Corsin. “Styling is ‘fashion’, so you have less of a need to communicate a hygienic benefit.”
Put another way, Pantene has remained a bestseller because it is familiar and inclusive, whereas niche brands such as Oribe and Moroccanoil have tapped into the notion that hair fragrances can telegraph a luxurious and seductive olfactive personality. When celeb hairstylist Oribe Canales decided to launch a line of namesake products in 2008, he enlisted the fragrance house responsible for Tom Ford’s high-end scents to develop a lush harmony of citrus, floral and woody notes, resulting in what Jessica Friedman, Oribe’s senior vice-president of product development, calls a “strong part of the DNA and brand identity”. The fact that women brag about using the Dry Texturizing Spray in lieu of perfume explains, at least in part, why the brand introduced a “hair refresher” followed by two eaux de parfum (as in, for the skin) based on the scent.
Moroccanoil, which has a unique, instantly identifiable scent, is among the few brands that hold a registered fragrance trademark. Co-founder Carmen Tal wouldn’t reveal specific notes, aside from “a little musk here, a little floral there, a hint of spice”, but she says the combined scent transports wearers to the Mediterranean. “Our goal was to capture the essences of the sand, the sea and the breeze,” she says, explaining that the brand wanted to provide a sense of wellbeing as well as high performance with its hair products. The development of the scent has been so successful, she adds, that people can instantly recognise Moroccanoil products, thereby enhancing the brand identity. The company now offers scented candles as well as body products.
Pantene, meanwhile, has taken its own version of a sensorial journey, tweaking its scent to coincide with fragrance trends. Rolanda Wilkerson, a principal scientist with the brand, points out that the original formulation was much headier with jasmine in the ’80s than it is today. Of course, back then, blockbuster scents (Dior’s Poison, Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium) were unapologetically aggressive. If consumers don’t notice the update, then the brands have succeeded. “We design our scents to be memorable over time but with a consistency of the main notes,” says Wilkerson, citing notes of blackberry, plum, violet, orchid and warm wood in descending order from top to bottom.
The notes used in hair products have changed over time for good reason, says hairstylist Howard Mclaren. The former creative director of Bumble And Bumble and recent co-founder of R+CO points out that hair scents, like perfumes, are always evolving, thanks largely to the functional components. Base ingredients today tend to be lighter so that the functional purpose of a hair fragrance – to mask aerosol, wax or cleansing agents – is less critical than the visceral impact. And then, of course, “it has to have that emotional content,” says Mclaren. When he cites his mother’s Elnett as his most resonant hair-scent memory, the universality of the phenomenon jells. “The world doesn’t need another shampoo. But [it] needs something to get excited about.”
And haircare just so happens to be a category in which brand identity and personality identity blur to cast an elusive, enduring spell. “Maybe it’s just me,” says Friedman, “but when you lean in and get a whiff of someone’s hair, it’s such an intimate moment. You’re getting a little secret of theirs. Sometimes you get that from [their] skin; but with hair, it’s almost a little romantic.”