Some Common Misconceptions About Celebrity Perfume

I’ve heard all of these in some variant over the years and maybe it’s time to gather up all my thoughts so the next time I get a question or remark like this, I can refer to this post and copy/paste. One of my resolutions for 2014 is efficiency (sometimes laziness). In truth, I’m just tired of seeing these misconceptions about celebrity fragrances bouncing around.

Kylie Minogue's Sexy Darling

Kylie Minogue’s Sexy Darling

1. Celebrity perfume is low quality and isn’t as good as brand name perfume.
Not really true. Most celebrity perfumes are pretty generic, dull and not really worth the time to fuss over. But their quality isn’t that much better or worse than most mainstream offerings. If it’s quality you really want, you’ll have to do a bit of research and experimentation to find what really works.

2. [Insert celebrity here] designed this fragrance.
More like, the fragrance company or house that partnered up with the celebrity had their professional perfumers come up with concepts, develop the fragrances, ran the stuff through a few rounds of testing and probably a grueling revision process before they presented the celebrity (or their representatives, in some cases) with the proposed product. I’ll never find myself in a situation where a fragrance house wants to make “Eau de Kay”, but lacking any sort of formal aromachemical training, I doubt they would let me do much beyond picking one out of a batch of sanitized samples. The thought of Snooki donning a lab coat to personally formulate her fragrance does make for some interesting mental imagery though.

3. Since this perfume has the celebrity’s name on it, they must use it all the time.
Sometimes true, sometimes not. Some people love wearing the same scent every day, all day. Some people like to mix it up and change scents from day to day. It’s pretty unrealistic to presume a celebrity would wear a fragrance with their name on it all the time. I’m sure some celebrities actually wear the fragrances that they endorse. At the same time, I think many of them wear other fragrances along with the ones they endorse. Then there are those where the fragrance really was just marketing and they don’t wear fragrances at all or wear something else entirely. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t laugh if I saw, “Justin Bieber caught wearing his ‘Girlfriend’ fragrance at mall” in the news. Unfortunately, I don’t read the entertainment column.

4. I like [insert celebrity here]. So I must also like their favorite perfumes.
Nothing would sadden me more than a potential perfume lover being turned off perfumes because they found the fragrances their favorite celebrities liked didn’t agree with them. Wear perfume that you like. Problem solved.

5. Celebrity branded perfumes smell like said celebrities.
I hope not. I would personally find it very disturbing if any human being’s “natural scent” was peaches, blueberry candy, caramel and faux sandalwood.

I had originally written this months ago and kept it on the draft list. Given how much JB’s been in the news lately, I wanted to hold off on release this for a while until things settled down. Heaven knows that kid doesn’t need any more publicity–good or bad!