Shoppers 35 and under want to smell like themselves, not everyone else, and that’s bad news for the many celebrity products that occupy the midrange. At the luxe end of the spectrum, consumers in the U.S., Europe and Asia — including young Chinese shoppers — want aspirational and unusual options.
— An explanation that fails to explain Le Labo Santal 33 (among others). Read more at Millennials Don't Want to Smell Like Celebs Anymore at Bloomberg.
Wait, so the article cites the success of Gucci Bloom, a fragrance so ubiquitous that it is available at every Ulta, Sephora, and department store in every city everywhere, in an article claiming that millenials want to smell unique…?
Yeah- The article is badly reasoned and written (it needed a copyeditor).
Basically, THIS is what the article was trying to say:
Millennial, in these surveys SEEM to not want the celebrity driven marketing that is behind fragrances. What they seem to want is marketing that is gear toward them AND a sense of being catered to, of having something that SEEMS handcrafted (when it is most assuredly not, as in the case of Le Labo.).
The vast majority of articles about perfume seem to be written by people who know little or nothing about perfume.
As near as I can tell, millennials do not want to buy mid-priced perfumes at Macy’s, the end. They are ok with mid-priced perfumes bought someplace cooler / hipper than Macy’s, and like everyone else, they are just fine if it smells like everybody else.
I don’t think that’s just true of millenials, I think it’s true of a large swath of the population right now.
The idea that perfumes have to “smell more expensive” is ludicrous — many expensive perfumes do not smell expensive.
Do people even know what high-end ingredients smell like? Modern perfumery has been so flattened out and same-ified that even expensive scents smell like everything else on the market. I was shocked when I sampled the first Lutens Golden Section scents, because they didn’t even smell like more expensive versions of his usual métier — they smelled like any department store scent, and at those demented prices ($600-$800), too.
Exactly — cashmeran & white musk, everywhere.
It’s the irony of this generation – they want to smell unique, just like everyone. They think they will smell different but cater to scents that the others also think will make them smell different.