Lady Gaga’s Fame Perfume

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Looks like the fabled Lady Gaga perfume is finally on its way. I have to admit, despite being cautious around celebrity releases (mostly because all of them tend to smell similar), I’m a bit interested about Gaga dipping her toe into the perfumed pool. Though a large part of that interest probably has to do with the huge anticipation surrounding this fragrance from her fans. Gaga herself is something of a publicity machine, which just adds to the buzz.

Photo by Bidgee

I don’t know if her fragrance will smell any different than the other celebrity scents we’ve all experienced. I’m skeptical the more I hear people speculating about it because it’s all blown out of proportion.

Unfortunately, the ingredients list and the road that leads to where the fragrance is now doesn’t hint that this will knock anybody’s socks off. See, the fragrance was developed by Coty (and Haus Laboratories, though you have to wonder how much work a fictional company actually did). Whatever beautiful things I can say about Chypre de Coty are diluted by the celebrity fragrances Coty has developed as of late.

So the notes in Lady Gaga’s perfume are as follows:

Tears of belladonna, crushed heart of tiger orchidea, a black veil of incense, pulverized apricot and the combinative essences of saffron and honey drops.

Let’s just strip the notes list above of all flowery language and get to the business side of things, eh? Which leaves us with belladonna, orchid, incense, apricot, saffron, honey.

Honestly, aside from the belladonna and incense, the fragrance is gearing up to smell pretty generic. But, incense can be a powerful thing that can lend a surprising amount of complexity to a scent–if done right. Belladonna, if such a thing will even be present in the actual perfume, is a little worrisome. I haven’t smelled belladonna, but from what I gathered, people don’t particularly like how it smells. It’s also poisonous.

There’s also been a lot of buzz about the nature of belladonna in a fragrance and how safe it will be. If this stuff is formulated anything like pretty much every other perfume out there, the “belladonna” will likely be synthetic, or is actually some concept you’re supposed to imagine or smell as opposed to actual belladonna. My money’s on the latter.

Still, it’s a bit early yet to judge Fame based upon its list of notes. Who knows? It might turn out to be a huge success. It might smell like something Paris Hilton’s name should be on. We’ll see. Fame is set to hit store shelves in September.

Perfumes For a Rainy Day

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With Debby off the coast of Florida, we’ve been getting some consistent rain here. Most of it is light, the winds aren’t intense where I am and the sky stays a soupy, grey color no matter what day of the week it is. I find it fascinating, the differences between my new home and my old one. I had never seen clouds fly so fast or so low before.

I watched the light drizzle misting the backyard the other day and got the strong urge to put on some Samsaraby Guerlain. It felt like an appropriate departure. Something dry and spicy and woodsy to take away the damp. My husband informed me later that day that we should be expecting weather like this for the rest of the week.

Maybe I’m a little strange (I seem to say that a lot, don’t I?), but I actually like the rain. Not thunderstorms and lightning, but a light drizzle that just mists everything. It reminds me of highrise apartments, a old place with a lot of character and a perfectly good window that you can sit beside and take in the smell and feel of light rain. That kind of mood calls for a bit of Un Lys by Serge Lutens like a little delicate floral would belong in a little delicate rain and fragrance the water.

Finally, today, sitting unscented in front of the computer with the rain dripping off the roof and onto the grass. I had a strange hankering for Chypre de Coty. I have yet to procure a vintage bottle and still only have a very small, but very precious sample of its vintage formulation. I took a sniff, did not wear any, and was reminded of the moment that I wrote that first Chypre de Coty review and distinctly remember that it was raining back then too. Odd how moments and moods bring out the scents.

What about you? What fragrances do you get the urge to wear or experience on rainy days?

Brand Awareness and Fragrances

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When it comes to fragrances, there’s a bit of bias when it comes to price point and branding. Fragrance branding is a very sensitive thing. Though perfume lovers will all agree that it’s not about the brand, it’s about the smell itself, we can’t help but be a little bit swayed by branding and marketing.

One of the things I learned as a graphic artist is the compelling strength of good branding. For a very succinct example of branding power and price points I’ll take a page from graphic designer, David Airey who asks us to investigate people’s perceptions of an item’s value.

He told us to think of Aston Martin and Skoda, two car companies.

The first, Aston Martin, has a brand identity appealing to luxury, charm and the sophisticated man and woman. Aston Martin even goes so far as to reel in James Bond, a character who leads a dangerous, exciting, upper class and often glamorous life.

On the other side, the Skoda, a reliable, economical car with good mileage and reliability. Surely we aren’t going to be conjuring up images of James Bond, hopping into his Skoda and calculating his mileage while he does his taxes and picks up milk after a quiet day at the office.

So if you were given the choice between an Aston Martin or a Skoda (assuming you knew them by brand and money wasn’t an issue), which would you chose? I would venture that most of you would pick the Aston Martin.

This picture makes me feel ridiculous!

And this is where things go back to perfume. Like it or not, branding has touched all of us for better or for worse. How many of us know fragrances by their brand? How many of us would pick a brand we never heard of over a brand we have? Or how many of us would pick a brand we know we like over a brand we’ve heard of but haven’t tried before?

And if we were each given a choice between a Chanel perfume or a Victoria’s Secret perfume, which would we chose? I bet the majority of us would take the Chanel fragrance for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons might just be the brand. After all, Chanel is about sophistication, luxury and high end fashion. When people think of Victoria’s Secret, they often think of underwear.

This is by no means a steadfast rule that applies to everyone, but it is a good idea to be aware of how companies and their approaches to marketing and branding themselves affects our perceptions of who they are and the quality of their product.

Just for fun, can you imagine if a company like Clive Christian (Oh, ye of the thousand dollar perfumes) stripped away their ultra luxurious exterior and started marketing affordable, fun, deodorant sprays to teenagers? You would see Clive Christian stands in drugstores with big pictures of cartoonish fruits hocking scents like “Radical Raspberry” or “Super Sweet Strawberry”. Maybe I’m getting a bit too giddy thinking about Clive Christian, taking a few steps away from the diamond-encrusted podium they’ve been standing on.

How about the bizarre scenario of the Axe Body Spray company all of a sudden deciding to put out a perfume based upon the classic chypre structure and marketed toward successful and distinctive men and women in their 40s and 50s? It’d be pretty strange, right? This is because people generally know of Clive Christian as that company that sells the most expensive perfume in the world and Axe Body Spray as that company that makes and sells those deodorant things that invade the hallways of high schools all over North America.

This preference for brands and perceptions of brands based on marketing isn’t our fault for being easily swayed or whatever. It is just how marketing works. And while there are a lot of fragrance marketing materials that turn off consumers (Marc Jacobs, I’m looking at you) or seem downright outrageous (Still looking at you, Marc Jacobs), the fact is branding sways us a bit more than most of us realize. We don’t have to be worried about this, but it wouldn’t hurt to be just a bit aware of how our perceptions are being changed and transformed every day.

Hodge Podge of Smells

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Ever walk by a Bath and Body Works or Victoria’s Secret and get slammed with that hodge podge of smells coming from within? And don’t get me wrong, this happens in the perfume section in Neiman Marcus as much as it happens in a Yankee Candle. A lot of people find it offensive. Be it offensive in its overwhelming qualities or offensive in its mish-mash of aromas that combine to form some mutant scent.

Luce’s Eau de Cologne

Perhaps I’m crazy, then, to admit that I actually kind of like that smell. I think of it as a challenge and I kind of like it. I wouldn’t like to stand about and smell it all day, but as a passing fancy and curiosity, I can’t say it’s offensive–most of the time.

See, when one of those hodge podge scents hits me, my brain always tries to pick out the dominant smells then categorize them and analyze what might come together to make this mixture. For example, at the moment, the Bath and Body Works at the mall by my house smells predominantly of faux cupcake, aqua, and a heavy dose of coconut and pineapple. This makes sense as a few of their featured fragrances for summer are heavily tilted toward vanilla and scents of the “cupcake” or “funnel cake” quality. Summer is also dominated by thoughts of the beach for many people which explains the aqua, and of course coconut and pineapple are derived from thoughts of escaping to the tropics to soak in the summer sun.

If we were moving up to a more department store level, walking by a Chanel counter in the 90s used to hit me with No.5. It almost always smelled of No.5 back then and always reminded me of sophisticated ladies, black dresses, and–for some reason–peacocks. These days the Chanel counter tends to smell a bit more like Chanel Chance or Coco Mademoiselle and often is a mixture of the two. They don’t play too well together, but they can be a fun challenge to dissect out of the hodge podge aroma that frequently floats out of the perfume department. Chanel counters these days remind me of modern fashionistas, the colors pink and light green, freshness, and metropolitan lifestyles.

Then there’s the hegemony of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab scents that wafts out of my holding box containing the numerous samples of BPAL I’ve collected over the years. There’s over a hundred vials in there which makes separating the scents rather difficult. Instead of being able to dissect it all, I interpret it as a representation of the all the scents I like because I tend to keep the samples I enjoy and trade the ones that I don’t. As a result, my BPAL samples box smells of spice, cotton, aqua, white florals and a touch of soft woods.

But maybe I’m just strange to like this kind of thing. A lot of people hate the mixture of smells as they say it gives them headaches, scent blinds them, or just stinks of synthetic fakeness. After all, how many pieces of media out there make fun of the perfume department smell? I’m reminded, in particular, of the episode of Spongebob Squarepants (don’t judge me) where Spongebob and Patrick had to escape through the “dreaded perfume section” of a department store.

Layout Change

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I had been back and forth about this one a lot and finally decided That Smell should start working with a new layout so the blog can keep growing without getting too cumbersome. There’s going to be some color changes and shifting around in the next week but nothing major. I hope you find the new layout easy to use and–with a little styling–easier on the eyes.

Paper Samples

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I remember when I was much younger, how my mother would like to hover around the fragrance counter and look over the new releases. And I’d marvel whenever the sales associate would just hand over some cute little glass vials filled with fragrance. Later on, my mother would let me try some and I’d find myself puzzling over how pretty and delicate those little sample vials are.

Paper Samples

Paper Samples

These days, you’d be hard pressed to find sample vials at some stores as fragrance houses seem to have gotten stingier with their sample stock. I also remembered the very rare occasion when a sample vial would get deposited in the mailbox. This had, in fact, only happened on two occasions and then nothing since.

Part of me thinks the reason sample vials don’t show up in mailboxes anymore is because of the cost. But another part of me knows that some people just don’t like the idea of finding a little glass tube in their mailbox filled with a fragrance that might be too strong or that they just don’t like.

My other frustration stems from the fact that department stores have gotten incredibly stingy with their samples over the years. A decade ago, if I expressed some interest in a fragrance I got a sample. These days, it’s only a few stores that will provide samples for me. And those samples work! I’ve purchased a number of full sized bottles because a sample charmed me into it. But it seems that practice is a bit rare these days, as fragrance counters hold onto their vials and the only time I ever really get offered a sample is if I buy something–and even then, it’s up to luck and the mood of the sales associate.

So in the stead of glass vials filled with scent, the fragrance companies have come up with a somewhat frustrating method of delivering their samples–at least by mail and print. For the longest time they’ve been wedging scent between sheets of paper, gluing them together, and wedging those pieces of paper inside of magazines and sales flyers.

I have to say, I vastly prefer the vials you can still get at some stores over this paper card business. There’s a luxury to the glass vials that you just don’t get out of a paper card. The vials are also much more effective at containing a fragrance as opposed to some paper. And needless to say, you can try the scent on yourself if you’ve got a vial of the stuff. I’d hate to think of people rubbing these scent cards on their wrists and getting a faint and skewed impression of a fragrance.

At the moment, I’ve got three scent cards plucked out of a Dillard’s sales flyer; J’Adore, Estee Lauder’s Beautiful, and Donna Karan’s Cashere Mist. I’ve reviewed or have it in my queue to review all three of these fragrances so I keep them around simply because they smell nice and they were free and someone else would have thrown them out anyway. I can’t say they’re filling me with the desire to go buy any of them as they’re all giving out an absurd amount of scent despite none of them having been opened yet and in a month or less they won’t smell like they should anymore.

It seems like a less effective practice to me. And the fragrance industry, despite periodically being annoyed about counterfeits, grey markets, and other products of “lesser value” are sure not conveying the same amount of luxury and prestige they could be projecting if they brought the glass vials back. I don’t necessarily want the vials to show up in my mailbox or wedged in some magazine. I just want those little vials to be a bit more plentiful at a department store.

My Favorite Smell

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I’ve hinted a couple of times in this blog that I recently moved. Up until November of last year, I lived in Canada where the winters ensured anything that would flower or pollinate would be hibernating for six to eight months out of the year. The rest of the year, I’d be bundled up in multiple layers and waiting at a platform to take me downtown where I worked. This made it very difficult to smell things like flower and nature. However, before Canada, I lived in Vietnam. If there ever was a place where I could smell nature–all the goods and bads of it–it was 1980s Vietnam.

I was very young when I left for Canada so there wasn’t much time to develop a concrete visual memory of the place. What they say about scent being a vehicle for memories is absolutely true. Where I can’t remember an accurate image of the little farm in Vietnam, I can remember how things smelled.

One of my favorite smells to this day is wood smoke and rain. The farmhouse I lived in had a wood burning stove and every day that stove would come on crackling with fire before the myriad of food smells envelop the kitchen from my grandmother’s cooking. Sometimes it would be raining when the stove was on, mixing the smell of wood smoke and water to form this beautiful warm smell. I suppose I grew to love this smell because it’s comforting and nostalgic and reminds me of a time when things I didn’t understand could have magical explanations. Like when it rains then that means the sky is crying.

About a year ago and a very long time since I’d last smelled wood smoke and rain, there was a series of wildfires smoldering in Western Canada. I was on my way to work, and there had been a bit of early morning rain that had begun to roll out. That was when that same smell hit me and sent me back to that smoky little kitchen on that farm with the soft rain hitting the tin roof.

This blog had been going on for a little while at the time I had rediscovered wood smoke and rain and I was searching for something I could call, “my favorite scent”. Well, I found it a long time ago–I just didn’t know it yet. Then I rediscovered it one morning on a rainy day in Canada. Now if only someone could bottle that stuff!

Expanding My Horizons

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With my pile of samples and pages of  review notes running out–along with the dwindling funds in my wallet–I’m going to start taking this blog on a more personal journey and posting a mixture of entries in addition to fragrance reviews. I’ll always be smelling and writing about it in review form, of course, just from now on you’ll be getting a bit more personal experiences from me–most will be perfume related, and some not.

Skulls and Roses Literally

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Ed Hardy is coming out with a Skulls and Roses fragrance duo for men and women. The men’s fragrance is supposed to be ozone based while the women’s fragrance is warm and sugary. Oh boy, another set of lame duck fragrances. I have to say the design principles arrived at for this one are–interesting.

And by interesting I mean, “really tacky”. Keep in mind that this is just a 3D model of what the bottles will look like. I might add the 3D quality isn’t that great to begin with. So you can rest a bit in knowing that the physical bottles might not look quite so plastic. I can’t understand why something like this is even coming out. Still I’m going to smell it. Who knows, maybe the bottle and the juice will have a bit of a spat and the juice inside these skulls will be surprisingly good.

Thanks to Refinery 29 for the image.

Let’s Take Things Slow

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I got married in January and have moved from Canada to the United States. While it was relatively easy before to get four updates out a week, then three updates per week, I find that I no longer have as much time on my hands. This is by no means a white flag of surrender. That Smell will still be updated regularly. However, in order to maintain a comfortable level of blog time vs. life time I must reduce the amount of updates from three a week to two a week.

You can expect updates to go up on Tuesdays and Thursdays in most occasions. If those days land on a major holiday, then I will post a day later or a day earlier. In either case, there’s plenty of That Smell to go around still.