If you’ve ever done jury duty (me, recently), you’ll know it can be an odd experience. If chosen, you end up determining someone’s fate, but until that point it involves long periods of sitting in a room and waiting to be called.
As a beauty journalist, I idled away the time by trying to work out who was wearing which scent. I clocked Chanel’s Coco a number of times, while Red Door by Elizabeth Arden and Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir seemed to swirl into the room out of nowhere.
While I understand why these decades-old fragrances are still firm favourites, the wearers themselves weren’t old at all. It made me wonder: are these scents ageing these dynamic, vibrant women?
— Read more, or, better yet, don't, in Your perfume could be ageing you – here's why at The Telegraph.
It’s behind a soft paywall, and I don’t feel like signing up for a free month, but I think the tone is pretty clear: Young people have to shun the classics and wear new things, because if you don’t, people will think you’re on your way to haggard irrelevance.
Or, to put it another way: How dare you age? How dare you not want to seem like a twenty-year-old in every particular? And most importantly, how dare you try to express your own taste and wear a scent that isn’t some of-the-moment concoction by one of our advertisers?
Ugh. Just ugh.
I just did a search and found a readable cache of the article.
It’s all pretty stupid.
*Please read in the voice of Carry Bradshaw*
While I understand, that everyone is quite entitled to an opinion, this doesn’t seem to be in depth beauty journalism. It made me wonder: does this article show that underresrched opinion pieces can pass for journalism?
No idea if this article was meant as journalism or an opinion piece. 🤷♀️ Certainly don’t agree with the opinion that perfume is tied to age, just as I don’t feel perfume is tied to gender.
So…what is this writer’s rule of thumb (or nose), I wonder, for selecting a fragrance? Does it have to have been launched within a certain number of years of the wearer’s birth, or high school graduation, or what? or *more* than a certain number of years from etc. etc.?
Absurd.
Since when does any of the fragrance s mentioned smell “old”??What determines “old” perfumes versus “young” perfumes?
I don’t like to diss people or journalism I don’t agree with online,but clearly this is just stupid and unnecessary fodder.
What a load of 💩!
I’ve often wondered over the past decade or so about scents that are specifically marketed to a young age group. After using them for a few years does the wearer think to themselves “Uh-oh… I’m too old to be wearing this… what do I do now?” It’s like a label on a toy: Ages 6-10. I’m glad to have grown up at a time when scents weren’t so categorized, there were very few available made for a young audience, and we weren’t bombarded with thousands of forgettable new ones launched every year.