IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLING PERFUME? We scents a change is in the air…

Can a fragrance be racist, misogynistic or ageist? An angry mob of consumers believes it can. Ingeborg van Lotringen investigates how the perfume industry became silenced and scentsored… and how it’s affecting the way we all smell

There’s a strange smell in the air. It’s innocent, cloying and pink, redolent of pre-teen girls. I smell it everywhere; in pubs and out at champagne receptions, in the supermarket, the office lift and in dimly lit bars made for seduction. I smell it on young, flirty women out at play but also on older, serious women mountaineering their way to the top of the career ladder. It is ubiquitous. There is no escape. Sniff the air and you, too, may catch the sweet, throat-catching scent drifting its way towards you. It is supposed to be uplifting, at least that’s what the marketing jargon would have you believe, but to me? It’s depressing. Because this, dear readers, is the smell of rot, eating away at one of the world’s great institutions: the perfume industry.

SCENTS OF THE TIMES

So who exactly is hell-bent on smothering one of the most innovative, intriguing and, at times, controversial industries in the beauty world? To understand that you need to start at the beginning. Perfume has been around for as long as man has been wearing a loincloth and Cleopatra was dousing herself in rosemary-and-myrrh-infused ass’s milk. While its original use was basically to mask the rank smells of a sewer-less world, perfume later became something else: a luxury, a sensory embodiment of the wearer and, perhaps most crucially of all, a cultural gauge of its time.

Take, for example, the joyous post-war years, which brought with them a raft of similarly uplifting floral chypres spearheaded by Miss Dior (ask your gran – today’s caramel imposter by the same name has zero to do with the original). Or the free-loving, earthy ’70s captured so perfectly in musky, bohemian scents like Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and Charlie by Revlon. And then of course there was the ’80s, a decade of pure neoliberal ambition, where the perfumes (Obsession! Poison! Samsara!) were as bold as the shoulderpadded women who wore them. The only thing these fragrances had in common were their vast differences, as back in the day perfumers were allowed to throw money and time at products designed to be as unique as the culture around them. But then a whole new millennium came along, and something changed.

A NOT-SO-BRAVE NEW WORLD

If there’s anything history will remember the millennium for, it’s celebrity culture. Celebrity shows, magazines and clothing ranges dominated our shops and our airwaves. It was only a matter of time before perfume would follow.

“JLo’s Glow kicked off the age of celebrity scents, along with Britney Spears’ Curious, which perfectly encompassed her bubblegum universe and proved there was money to be made from young girls and fudge notes,” says Jack Hewitt of Roja Parfums. It worked. Glow raked in $100 million in its first year, while Curious was the best-selling perfume in department stores in 2004, its year of release. But why? What did

“Every scent came up smelling of cake”

those two have that perfumers had failed to bottle before?

The answer: an intoxicating mix of a celebrity name and a juice smelling of gentle florals and/or irresistible sweets. It was a formula that could be churned out quickly and cheaply, designed not to put off anyone (who doesn’t like flowers and caramel!?) and applicable to any celebrity you like, from Kylie to Katy Perry to One Direction and beyond. Bottles flew off the shelves. Perfume executives patted themselves on the back. The scent world had rarely seen anything like it before. And its success was only compounded by the financial crash of 2008, when a world reeling from the worst recession since the Great Depression of the ’30s needed perking up. Ethyl maltol, the candyfloss-copy, mouth-watering molecule responsible for the celebrity-scent sales surge, now got marketed as happiness in a bottle, and soon even grown-up scents like YSL Black Opium and Guerlain La Petite Robe Noire came out smelling of cupcakes. Globally by mid-2018, 70% of new launches had sugary accords, 75% were housed in pink bottles, and seven out of the 10 most popular scents were sweet.* For an industry renowned for its ability to provoke and innovate, something had gone very wrong.

But why? The current generation is a fiery mix of millennials and iGenners (anyone born in the mid-’90s and later, named as the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone). They are highly opinionated, dedicated to free expression, promoting diversity and progressive change, particularly with relation to gender and the environment. How then did a scent that smells like the inside of Barbie’s pants drawer come to represent their culture?

EXPRESS YOURSELF (CORRECTLY)

“Corporately and socially, the acceptable spectrum of individuality and self-expression is actually tightly controlled,” says perfume consultant Nick Gilbert of Olfiction.com, who believes that, contrary to appearances, iGenners are far more conformist than previous generations. “And this is reflected in the scents people choose.”

What’s more, this is a generation that’s noticeably more wary and circumspect when it comes to sex. Remember, they are growing up in an age that has birthed #Metoo, The Everyday Sexism Project and some of the oldest virgins on record (one in eight millennials are 26 before they have sex†). Where, then, does that leave an industry whose very purpose is

based on traditional notions of seduction through scent?

“It’s all quite sexless and of no extreme opinion now,” says James Craven, fragrance archivist at London scent emporium Les Senteurs and a perfume consultant for 30 years. And it’s not just sex that’s off the table, he finds: “People want ‘vegan’ fragrance and get het up over ambergris, which is whale poo [a venerated ‘fixative’ ingredient in perfume] that washes up in great big blocks on the beach and has a sweet, earthy aroma. I can assure you no whale is offended, much less harmed, by our use of it, but perfumers have begun to avoid the ingredient because they’re tired of having to defend its inclusion.” Yet, interestingly, sales of perfumes that boast “all-natural ingredients” are up. That’s funny given all perfume needs a blend of naturals and synthetics to really work, which means the term “natural” in perfumery means very little.

CREATIVE ATROPHY, COMMERCIAL DEATH

The thing is, avoiding sexual and sometimes morally dubious references (perfumes have evoked harems, violent S&M, and the decadence of Berlin on the cusp of war, to touch on a few) poses a bit of a problem for a product that is all about visceral pleasure. Like any art, perfume should unleash emotion and provoke discussion. As maverick perfume creator Serge Lutens tells me: “I’d rather people spat in my face than robotically praised everything I do.” But things do get tricky when people are permanently poised to take offence. This piece, for example, partly came about when a female colleague recounted a story of speaking with perfume authority Frédéric Malle about the sensual possibilities of scent. While she emerged invigorated and inspired by the conversation, her younger peers were appalled, feeling, from what my colleague told them, Malle had been inappropriate and rather chauvinistic. I thought this odd, given this is a generation that values free speech. But then several of the most lyrical perfume experts in my contacts book declined to be interviewed for this very feature on the grounds of being fed up with the aggravation they get for their interpretations of scent.

They’ve been attacked for praising animalic notes (even though these, today, are all synthesised), and for

“Perfume should provoke discussion”

describing scents as “curvaceous” (“sexist”) or “like radiant white skin” (“racist”) to name just a few examples. If you remember that scent barely has a vocabulary of its own but relies on comparisons to sights, sounds, flavours and feelings to bring it to life to those who can’t smell it, you can begin to see how much any level of censorship can affect the industry.“If I worked for a big perfume brand, I’d be scared to do anything remotely challenging,” says Craven.“I genuinely think someone, somewhere, will soon bring a case for feeling ‘traumatised’ by a scent and what it’s said to express.”

That said, some commercial perfume houses have dared to be daring over the past 15 years: think Mugler’s odd-salty Womanity, Alexander McQueen Kingdom (which smelt of post-coital sweatiness) and voluptuous tuberose Gucci Bloom (heavy on the “indole” note present in white flowers: in large quantities, it begins to reek of bottoms). But each time, says Gilbert, the brands got burned sales-wise. And so, time and again, the mass and designer fragrance industry goes back to the insipid smells that we all know so well, comfortable in the knowledge they won’t offend even the most combative virtue signaller. They come disguised as brand new scents (that don’t smell remotely new) or they nail their copycat colours to the wall as “flankers” – safe, minimal spins on best-selling perfumes. In 2017, these made up no less than 30% of all fragrances sold.‡ Which leaves said industry in something of a predicament.

“What drives growth is true newness, real creativity, personalisation and a sense that you’re buying into something truly special,” says Michelle Feeney of Floral Street fragrances. There isn’t a scent-loving insider I speak to who doesn’t agree that if the commercial mass and designer fragrance business doesn’t commit to getting its creative mojo back, the bottom could fall out of it. Celebrity scents have already expired (UK sales dropped by almost 40% in the past two years‡), and growth in the market overall is steadily declining. Standing at 3% in 2017, it was in the double digits just a few years ago, and what growth there is is largely due to heavy discounting.

PERFUME: A NEW DAWN

So who has the answer? Well, the niche fragrance market (small, independent perfumers and exclusive collections by big brands like Chanel and Dior) is actually booming in terms of trade (the segment grew by 29% last year) as well as out-there creativity. But costing an average of £150 per bottle and with limited distribution, those concoctions are beyond reach for most people (especially the cash-strapped millennial generations), cutting them off from the chance to flex their olfactory muscle altogether.

Perhaps the real answer lies within us all. Free speech and expression needs to be just that – an acceptance (or certainly tolerance) of all points of view. Perfumers need to be able to innovate without shame or reprobation, while consumers need to understand that “challenge”, whether in the form of divisive accords or imagery and language, is part of living in a free and diverse world. Because for all the progressive bounds this generation is succeeding in making, wouldn’t it be a shame if everyone smelt the same while doing it?