This is what I find so funny. So much of it is just about marketing. Something can be in a black bottle with lots of skulls, but it may be composed of roses and jasmine. But the thing is, because your mind wants to think, 'This is deathly,' you're going to convince yourself that it's deathly. And that's the beauty of perfume. It's all fantasy.
— Steven Gontarski of Scent Bar talks to columnist Melissa Broder about "challenging" fragrances. Read more at Notes From Underground: Can a Fragrance Help Us Embrace Mortality? at Elle. Hat tip to Kevin!
The emotions smells conjure up in our minds are so subjective it’s not suprising there is a discrepancy between what you feel and what the manufacturer intends you too feel.
But the image they want to project can sway you in a certain direction.
When I bought L’Artisan’s Dzing! I was very aware of the circus imagery even though it didn’t conjure up the one time I actually went to the circus. I wrote once in a perfume forum, very passionately, about the sawdust, the fur of the tiger, the whip of the animal tamer, the burnt sugar of the candied apples and noted that it didn’t excactly smell like the circus, but any circus I may encounter in the future will forever remind me of Dzing! And to this day it mingles with my, very complex, fantasies about the circus. Even though my actual memories of them are pretty bland.
Yes — and not everybody hears / reads all the marketing stuff anyway. In fact I often wonder if anybody but perfumistas pays attention to backstory.