If there’s one thing I’m totally passionate about it’s perfume – more than poetry, more than parsnips, more than peristyles or pain-au-chocolat. I find perfume, and the multi-billion dollar perfume industry, absolutely fascinating, and I’d love to write more about it, especially as there are so few good perfume journalists out there.
Why this should be is a bit of a mystery, but it means that for most people the subject of perfume continues to be surrounded by as much mystification and snobbery as the subject of, say, wine was a good twenty years ago.
Today, largely thanks to two decades of excellent wine journalism, we know more about wine than we ever did before, and that’s reflected not just in our confidence in choosing from the vast array of choice on offer, but also in the booming health of the industry itself.
So why, when wine journalism is so good, is the general standard of perfume writing so pathetic? A lot of the blame lies with the perfume companies themselves, most of whose press releases somehow manage to combine utter nonsense with flights of pretension so other-worldly that one wonders what kind of prescription drugs their copywriters are on. What’s depressing, though, is how many ‘beauty’ journalists simply copy out the crap that the perfume companies send them, which does nothing to help the poor reader understand what the fragrance in question is about.
The result is a sector dominated by the brands with the deepest pockets and the perfumes with the biggest advertising budgets: it’s as if we’re still stuck in the 1970s days of wine, with most people’s choice limited to the scent equivalents of Mateus Rose and Blue Nun.
Is it any wonder shopping for perfume is such a dispiriting experience? With practically no useful information to go on, how is anyone supposed to make an informed decision when they’re confronted by the hundreds of different perfumes on the shelves of an average department store – especially with over-made-up saleswomen bearing down on them from all sides, spraying noxious clouds of the latest big-name scent in their direction?