Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, a professor of consumer psychology at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, connects the shift away from a signature scent with a weakening sense of identity. "The more time you spend online, the more you want to change how you represent yourself," she says. "You never really establish a proper sense of self."
— Read more in Smells like teen spirit: Inside Gen Z's obsession with luxury fragrances at Business Insider.
That’s an interesting little theory. How could we test that? Who has now or has had in the past, loyalty to a signature scent? Who has always played the field, and never kept to one scent?
When I and my 2 cousins each turned 16, my French grandmother bought us real perfume as a welcome to womanhood. Mine was Je Revien by Worth, I loved it. I religiously wore it, and only it, well into my late 20s. Friends recognized it and I was linked to that scent. I had the perfume, bath oil, lotion, dusting powder. Then suddenly it just wasn’t me anymore. I still like it and still have some original perfume in a lovely Lalique globe bottle covered in tiny stars, but I never wear it. I am more into deeper scents now, incense, Oud and Amber. Plus I will say I absolutely hate the reformulation they did, so I don’t need to purchase any in the future.
That’s a lovely story. I was mostly a signature scent girl back in the 70s-80s with Je Reviens as well, although I had little flings with CK Obsession and with Shiseido Inoui. Later, when I couldn’t find my beloved Je Reviens anymore, it was Tresor, only parfum format. But I think that was partly because the people I knew (my mom and other relatives, good friends) didn’t have large collections back then.
I can see the professor’s point about time spent online. I would love to read the entire article.
While I don’t agree with the “sense of self” part, I do think there was an already existing culture of conspicuous consumption that has been made much, much worse by the internet. Since I’m part of it I can’t moralize.
I’m running into a paywall for this article. Does anyone have any tips to get around it or a new link?
Yes, me too. I did see that she spends $600 monthly on her perfume habit.
Yikes! Yes, I went back into the article and that’s about as far as I can see too. I’m glad I got deeper into perfume around 2007 so have already gone through my heyday of wanting to smell everything. The perfume offerings weren’t so vast and expensive then!
https://www.removepaywall.com/
Thank you, Robin! I definitely could have done my own research on this so I appreciate you providing this. Bookmarking it for future use. 😉