13 Monday May 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
Emporio Armani, the diffusion line from Giorgio Armani, released this duo of his-and-her fragrances in 2017. Are they still around? I haven’t even bothered to check. The scents themselves were pretty run-of-the-mill. Their promotional image is the only reason I remember their launch, since it seems to be a nod to an iconic New York City photograph…
29 Monday Apr 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
It’s amazing how many different fragrance brands exist or have existed, even in the not-so-distant past. For example, this ad caught my eye when I was browsing the results of some random image search, but I’m not familiar with the name “Marta Harff.” I looked her up and learned that she’s an Argentinian entrepreneur who has run several fragrance/toiletry brands, including a namesake line of “Aguas Florales” (“flower waters”). This one is “Manzanilla.” (Chamomile?)
What really interested me in this ad (which seems to date to the 1990s) was the image it used on the bottle label and in the background…
28 Thursday Mar 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent, Art and Scent
Fragrance aficionados don’t pay much attention to Elizabeth Arden’s fragrance line these days, and I can’t really blame them (us)—the brand’s perfumes, and even their marketing, aren’t too memorable…
11 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
One of the major mainstream fragrance releases for autumn 2013 was Estée Lauder’s Modern Muse, with the tagline “Be An Inspiration” and an advertising campaign featuring the model Arizona Muse.
In the initial advertising for this fragrance, Muse (the person, with the perfume!) made an appearance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In the print ads, including the one above, she poses inside the Guggenheim, which is immediately identifiable by its spiral ramp and its circular skylight…
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…
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…
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…
06 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in Advertising and Scent
In my looks at fragrance and advertising, I’d also like to mention a few perfume ads that take their inspiration from film as well as the more traditional visual arts.
Elizabeth Arden’s campaign for Fifth Avenue is contemporary as well as film-influenced. Fifth Avenue was released in 1996 and it’s still in production; the Arden website describes it as “a sparkling, sheer floral with subtle warmth and richness.”…
