Acqua di Parma’s Signatures of the Sun range
Acqua di Parma sticks to what it does best
We’re told that scents tap into our emotional centres, the oldest, most powerful parts of our brains. Whole companies exist whose job it is to develop smells to attract new customers into shops, heighten value perception and hike up sales. Harder is the business of selling scent itself. How do advertisers convey the “brand values” of a fragrance? (What are the “brand values” of a fragrance, exactly, beyond smelling nice?) It’s why so many scents are sold using a Hollywood himbo, a provocatively sexual strap line, or a baffling black-and-white TV ad campaign.
Acqua di Parma does none of these things. It has pretty much stuck to the same “Parma yellow” design, bottle-stop glass container, handfinished packaging and folksy sans serif typeface to sell itself for 103 years. It is associated with the Riviera, and with timeless Italian style. A triumph of branding where little branding exists. (Those Art Deco bottles can be hard to throw away, even if empty.)
When it does release a new product it does so without noise, in a way that is understated and chic. Which brings us to Signatures of the Sun, a new collection “filtered through the prism” of Acqua di Parma’s classic Colonia scent, that comes in 10 choices: from Osmanthus (heady) to Camelia (spicy) to Yuzu (citrusy) to Leather (leathery).
Unlike some of its shoutier neighbours, Acqua di Parma doesn’t promise to make you a leading man or bewilder you into submission with arthouse imagery. It exists to be a handsome, and handsome-smelling, object in its own right. The rest is up to you.
○ acquadiparma.com