30 Sunday Dec 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
Happy New Year! Are you greeting 2019 with a Champagne toast? I’ll be celebrating at a friend’s place and there’s a good chance we’ll be enacting this ritual.
I haven’t decided on my fragrance for the evening yet, but if I owned any Yves Saint Laurent Champagne, I’d dab on a few drops. This feminine fragrance was launched in 1993 and joined a line-up of several other remarkable YSL fragrances, including Opium (1977), Rive Gauche (1971), and Paris (1983).
24 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
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Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a season of scented delights!
06 Thursday Dec 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
I filed away this Caron advertisement from 1940 a while ago, not just because I liked it, but because I had a feeling that its imagery was borrowed from some earlier work of art. Yesterday, in a completely unrelated search, I came across the source…
23 Friday Nov 2018
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Here’s a Coty advertisement from 1949, featuring an array of gift sets and special holiday editions of classic fragrances like Chypre, Emeraude, and Muguet de Bois. I wish I could step back in time and pick up some L’Origan, maybe even in the “Cinderella slipper” packaging…
Wishing you luck with any shopping you may be doing today!
15 Monday Oct 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
“Discover JOY by Dior. Finally, joy is captured in a fragrance marked by enveloping softness and energy, all at once. An ode to pleasure, to life.” (via Dior website)
I smelled this fragrance in Sephora and couldn’t be bothered to request a sample. I don’t even think we’ve reviewed it on Now Smell This; apparently, none of the blog’s four writers could be bothered. That gives you a pretty good idea of the fragrance’s “energy.”
However, the print ads for Joy, featuring Jennifer Lawrence, have brought me back for a second look. Here’s Ms. Lawrence, damp hair pushed back and neck glistening with drops of water, emerging from some aquamarine ripples (a swimming pool? tropical sea?).
She could be a contemporary interpretation of the goddess Aphrodite, born from the ocean. She could be an evocation of an mermaid—oh, the whole seemingly never-ending mermaid trend!
Or she could be styled and photographed to evoke an older set of images of another celebrity…
07 Friday Sep 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
As we bid farewell to American actor Burt Reynolds (1936-2018), let’s look back to his ads for Elizabeth Taylor’s perfume White Diamonds…and some of his other scent-related moments.
White Diamonds was released in 1991 and was a best-selling celebrity fragrance long before every pop star and her sister jumped on the celeb-scent bandwagon. Taylor and Reynolds had already been friends for a long time (he reportedly advised her on negotiating her $1 million salary for Cleopatra), and he was featured in television and print ads for White Diamonds in 1998. Kenny Rogers also did the honors in his own set of White Diamonds ads.
(These appearances obviously pre-dated Brad Pitt’s bizarre 2012 campaign for Chanel no. 5, which was hailed as a groundbreaking move—a male star as the face of a top-selling feminine fragrance. Apparently we’d already forgotten about the Men of White Diamonds.)
04 Tuesday Sep 2018
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For those of you returning to school this week (as student or as teacher) or for any of you embarking on a new research or writing project this fall—here’s a magazine advertisement for Revlon’s Intimate. This perfume was released in 1955 but the ad seems to date to the early-1960s.
Wishing you luck as you hit the books this fall!
29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
My husband and I recently went to see the new documentary McQueen. I’ve been an admirer of Alexander McQueen’s work for a long time—even before his death in 2010. In 2011 I was a frequent visitor to “Savage Beauty,” the retrospective exhibition of Alexander McQueen’s designs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I’m still haunted by McQueen’s artistry and the magical way it was showcased there…
08 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
It has recently come to my attention that today is International Cat Day (or, as I like to call it, “Wednesday”). In that spirit, I offer you five images of fabulously fragrant felines!
The first one is a circa-1890s trade card for E. W. Hoyt, based in Lowell, Massachusetts. This cat and her kittens are promoting Hoyt’s German Cologne, with a side-mention of Rubifoam tooth cleanser. Note the distracting presence of the canary in the upper right corner of the scene…
