The futility of perfume sales copy

I’m going to tell you a little story about a perfume that made me laugh out loud. It begins at Basenotes, where, through the kind actions of the endlessly generous perfume community, one can sometimes obtain samples as part of swaps and ’round robin’ parcels that were not asked for; just added for funsies. As part of such a parcel, I received a few Bond No9 samples a few years ago. Prior to sniffing them, I decided to look for the official descriptions of the scents (although I don’t always do this – depends if you want your imagination and olfaction to be primed by what you see and read). In this case, I did.

One of the samples was of a perfume called New Haarlem, described by Bond No9 like so:

Northbound with the A-train to cabaret-jazz club-central… a scent so brazen it was barely captured in a bottle. Molten liquefied swank with androgynous appeal, to wear after midnight, in — and on — hot-spots. Notes: Lavender, bergamot, green leaves, coffee, cedarwood, amber, vanilla, tonka, patchouli

Interesting, interesting. Swank, you say? A brazen, wild scent to wear after midnight, you say? The image that goes with it suggests a smoky jazz club in New York.

Via Bond No9

How do we smell things, exactly? I don’t mean the theory of olfaction (which is still debated about and not entirely set in stone), but how do we experience it? Well, we smell largely based on three things 1) how our olfactory genes have been expressed in each individual, 2) how our scent associations, starting from our mother’s diet while pregnant with us and continuing to develop through life experiences and cultural influences, shape our scent preferences and 3) how we are manipulated by colour, words, packaging, bottles, brand associations and circumstances in which we experience the smell.

The first two are usually the strongest of the three influences. Especially the second. So, to me, New Haarlem:

Finnish cinnamon and cardamom buns served with a cup of coffee, via Paulig.fi

When I smelled the perfume, I burst out laughing. Jazz club in New York? A dangerous, androgynous midnight predator; out to sex you up? Naah. It was “kahvi ja pulla” (Finnish cinnamon and cardamom bun and coffee); the safest, most common, most pedestrian and comforting snack; the Finnish equivalent of tea and a biccie.

The overbearing impression is of sitting in a Finnish coffee shop – a very old-fashioned one at that – and smelling not only the bun you are about to take a bite out of, but the percolator coffee machine behind the counter, left on for a couple of hours too many with the coffee starting to burn and turn bitter. I see the wooden chairs and the gingham-style tablecloths. The metal wire stand with red-top tabloid newspapers by the till. The jugs of cream and milk by the counter.

When the scent developed, I started to think that maybe the coffee had been served with milk after all and I’d spilled some of it on my blouse. Maybe it had even been a new-fangled cappuchino? Maybe the cafe had been one of the modern ones in Helsinki. I was getting whiffs of that spilled-cappuchino for a couple of hours. The coffee note persists throughout the scent’s lifetime and the drydown warms into something still spicy, but less foody.

Did I mind that the scent didn’t match the – no doubt – carefully crafted marketing message and sales copy? Did I heck; when I got to visit New York, I made a point of popping into the Bond No9 boutique (even though I was clearly not their target market, judging by the coolness with which the sales assistants there treated me) and bought myself a big bottle of New Haarlem. Now I wear it when I get homesick for Finnish cafes and want to wear something that makes me smile.

This shows that while it’s impossible to effectively sell a perfume without some kind of sales copy (or is it? At least for as long we won’t be able to smell through our computers it is); sales people shouldn’t worry if the customer’s impression of the scent is as far from the intended image as a Finnish coffee shop is from a jazz club in New York. This is also why cultural nose-calibration is quite a key issue in international perfumery; why perfumery schools are keen to get people from the target markets they are interested in (because what smells “fresh” in the USA might smell repulsive in China, or what smells like Christmas in Germany might smell of the dentist in the States). Is it possible to really influence people with perfume sales copy? Absolutely. But only when the copy has enough cross-over with the target audience’s imagination and scent associations – and the perfume itself.

If you get your perfume sales copy right, it will match the perfume and its target customers’ expectations fairly closely and if you get your sales and marketing team right, they will approach any views that differ with humour and honesty.

Our blood cells have odourant receptors – what could this mean?

Blood cells by Bruce Wetzel and Harry Schaefer via Wikimedia Commons

There is still so much we don’t understand about how our sense of smell works and a recent report on the findings of Peter Schieberle, Ph.D., suggests things are even weirder than we thought.

“Our team recently discovered that blood cells – not only cells in the nose – have odorant receptors,” said Schieberle. “In the nose, these so-called receptors sense substances called odorants and translate them into an aroma that we interpret as pleasing or not pleasing in the brain. But surprisingly, there is growing evidence that also the heart, the lungs and many other non-olfactory organs have these receptors. And once a food is eaten, its components move from the stomach into the bloodstream. But does this mean that, for instance, the heart ‘smells’ the steak you just ate? We don’t know the answer to that question.”

What does this mean? We don’t know yet. Why would our blood cells need odorant receptors? Does this discovery offer any insight into why our flavour preferences differ?

The implications for flavourists and food technologists could be huge. The way we perceive foods depends on not only flavour and olfactory signals, but on texture, temperature and colour of the foods.

For example, baked beans and beans in foods like chili provide a “full,” rich mouth-feel. Adding the component of beans responsible for this texture to another food could give it the same sensation in the mouth, Schieberle explained. Natural components can also interact with substances in foods to create new sensations.

This research was presented on the 7th of April at the 245th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical society.

Read the Science Daily report here.

Is your perfume Elvis or Belvis?

Back at the birth of modern perfumery (which is generally accepted to be the 19th century when materials such as vanillin, coumarin and aldehydes became available) it was easy to mesmerise people with exotic names and fantastical stories about perfumes. The world of perfumery was alchemical, secretive, competitive – and any information released to the public domain was likely to contain deliberate red herrings. Analysing the competition depended on early chemical testing techniques, gossip and the nose.

Since it is not possible to patent a smell (although people have tried), perfume success relied on a good name and a unique product – until someone managed to corner the market by creating an improved variation of your theme. And of course this is healthy and no different from what has happened in art and music over centuries; copy, twist, mix, renew, and regurgitate the popular themes of the day ad nauseaum until the perfect mix of brave risk-taking and talent creates a new trend. So the oriental category was born of Western imagination of what “the Orient” smelled like and the fougere category from a theme created around an artist’s impression of fern. Cultural and political themes have influenced trends but the availability of new raw materials has had just as much (if not more) influence on where our noses have been led and what each decade has smelled of.

Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry; the “oven”-technique that can analyse forensic evidence or, if correctly calibrated, the chemical signature of perfumes, changed the game. Perfumers had to throw their red herrings into the juice and hope that competitors wouldn’t be able to pinpoint exacly how they had put the scent together. Nevertheless, the ability to see the perfumes in their underwear allowed the chemists and perfumers in other manufacturing facilities to easily estimate what they would look like naked.

It became possible to colour in the photocopy of a photocopy, steal a bit from here, a bit from there – and maybe add a slight twist or a dollop of a new synthetic material, and fast perfume is now just as real as fast fashion – fleeting, copied, cheaply made under enormous pressure to keep generating something new, new, NEW. The economic pressures from shareholders of big corporations and increasingly strangulating safety regulations are making it really difficult for the mainstream perfumers to do anything but a passable Elvis impersonation. Maybe with a different pair of plastic sunglasses.

Taking a calculated risk and trying to set a new trend used to be more common in perfumery. An over-dose of a new material, or a totally new, bold accord – but now it seems that the indie perfumers and niche brands are the only ones brave enough to experiment. I find it frustrating that the “industry” often reacts with cool detachment at best, or sneering contempt at worst, towards the success of some classically untrained perfumers but then doesn’t manage to support genuine risk-taking and innovation within its own domain. If the classically trained perfumers aren’t allowed to experiment and aren’t given the time or the budget to create a totally new trend (unless they run off and start their own brand) then what will happen to mainstream perfumery? Will it keep going increasingly towards fast fragrance, novelty value and functional fragrances or is a bit of a renaissance long overdue?

A perfume training workshop coming up in April

Have you always wanted to know how perfumes are made? Do you blog about perfumes or sell them? Do you want to see if a career in perfumery might be right for you?

Penny Williams

My friend Penny Williams from Orchadia is running a one day perfume training workshop that you might be interested in. Download the event info and see what you think! This is likely to sell out fast so think quickly.

The event is happening on Tuesday 16th of April in Thrapston, Northants, UK.

This is what Penny has to say about the day:

Come along to our Perfume Training Workshop to smell & discover more about perfume and perfumery.
With lots of practical smelling & real world examples of ingredients and perfumed products, we will explore perfume and all it entails.
Starting with raw materials and how we smell, we’ll then explore the job the perfume does. It’s not just a pretty smell! What makes a perfume ’right’ for a person, a product or a package? How are fragrances created in a modern day Perfume House? In addition we’ll visit the technical & creative requirements and undertake a fragrance creation exercise.

HQ perfume relaunched at Lush 29 High Street

29 High Street perfume, in Lush Spa Poole.

When I worked at Lush, customers often asked: “Can I buy this smell? The smell of the shop?”, to which we’d have to reply “no, but here are some other perfumes you might like”. Until, that is, I was working on the Christmas 2012 product perfumes and was given a bath ballistic that looked like the 29 High Street shop in Poole.

The ballistic never made the cut, but the scent I developed for it caught the attention of Mark Constantine who asked me to work it up to a sprayable perfume so he could bottle it and sell it at Lushfest (a company event for 2000 staff and customers). So, off I went, and the second variation was bottled. Had I been able to work on it some more I would have probably adjusted the opening – it’s a little sharp for my liking with an overdose of lemongrass – but overall I think the fragrance fits the brief pretty well. It’s like a “shop tour” in a bottle. You get wafts of Honey I Washed The Kids, Karma, Creamy Candy, American Cream, Flying Fox, Butterball, Blue Skies, and of course Avobath, responsible for that lemongrass opening. So how did I do it? How was it possible to cram in the entire tutti-frutti smell of a Lush shop into one perfume?

I went into full geek-mode and spoke to our essential oils buyer about the tonnage of materials Lush uses each year. Rather than immediately thinking of individual products, I scanned the list and highlighted all the major materials, then scanned it again and caught all the materials that may not be used in high volumes but have a prominent odour profile. I now had a set of potential building blocks. Only then did I start listing Lush best-sellers and picking out themes from each of their product scents.

Grant Osborne’s adorable illustration of 29 High Street perfume.

Eventually I had an impressionist interpretation of the smell of a Lush shop, which is what was used in the bath product prototype. When I went back to the lab with the formula to work it up to a perfume, I added some extra facets and ended up with less of an impressionist interpretation; more of a sleight of hand where everyone who smells the scent seems to pick out their own interpretation of what a Lush shop smells like. One of the best moments of my entire life was at Lushfest, when we were setting up the Gorilla Perfume shop and a staff member walked past seconds after we had been spraying HQ perfume. She asked to try it and squeaked: “Oh my God! It smells just like the Lush shop!” She had no idea what the perfume was supposed to be about.

I realise the Lush Smell is Marmite-ish. If you think it’s awful and wonder how people can work in there, move along, nothing to see here. It’s your worst nightmare in a bottle. If, on the other hand, you are a Lush fan and have always wanted that smell as a perfume, you can now buy the 29 High Street perfume from the Lush shop in Poole. I called it 29 High Street because that’s the shop’s address, but the name of it morphed into HQ at some point. I’m glad to see it in its new bottle and with its original name.

This article was originally published at Basenotes as part of my Study Notes series.

 

A little London perfume tour (featuring tea and cake at Fortnum’s)

One of the best things about the internet is how it’s brought fellow fragrance nerds together and allowed us to get to know each other. People from all sorts of backgrounds can become fascinated by scents and it’s great to have the opportunity to hang out with such an interesting bunch. I’ve been running small perfume tours in London for a few years and yesterday I met up with a few friends in Spitalfields and visited Angela Flanders, Bloom and Patisserie Valerie (yes, cake is an essential part of any decent perfume tour). Then we headed to Piccadilly Circus and walked to Geo F. Trumper’s perfumery and had afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason. Fortnum’s perfume and toiletries department is opulent, old-fashioned and a must-see for any perfume fan heading to London. I bought Angela’s Precious one and Trumper’s Ajaccio Violets (which sounds like a spell from Harry Potter). I might write about Angela Flanders and Bloom a bit more in the future, but here are some photos!

We met at Patisserie Valerie for breakfast.

Healthy breakfast foods.

This is what my friends were having. I had a cheese and tomato croissant. Looking at these pictures, I wish I could go back and have the cake, too.

A chocolate croissant.

(World’s first?) crowd-sourced perfume from 4160 Tuesdays.

On the way to Angela’s perfumery, there’s an old wall with a new building right behind it. One way to conserve things, I guess!

Artillery passage.

Angela Flanders’ perfumery.

Angela’s daughter was there to meet us and told us stories about her mum’s perfume creations. I can’t remember the last time I received this warm a welcome at a perfumery.

Inside Angela’s perfumery.

Look, it’s Persolaise’s book!

Sarah Mc Cartney (polymath and perfumer at 4160 Tuesdays) and Karen Gilbert (author and perfumery teacher).

Sniffing perfumes at Angela’s

We worked our way through everything.

Window display at Angela’s.

I bought Precious One, the FiFi award-winning soft vetivert perfume.

We walked to Bloom’s which is just around the corner.

Sweetish Old Books at Bloom’s.

A nice display at Bloom’s.

Inside Bloom’s.

Glasses hanging from the ceiling at Bloom’s.

Caron perfume urns at Fortnum & Mason

We made our way to Piccadilly and Sarah took us to Trumper’s behind Fortnum’s.

Refined old-style colognes at Trumper’s. I liked everything I smelled.

I bought Ajaccio Violets – an old-style sweet violet cologne. I had something similar as a child and it’s a smile in a bottle for me.

We had booked at table at Fortnum’s for 3pm and had some tea and cake. Mine was a lemon tart and Earl Grey. Fantasic tea; Fortnum’s deserves its reputation for this.

We also spent quite a while sniffing Sarah’s perfumes and chatting.

Bisquit packaging at Fortnum’s.

Stairs at Fortnum’s.

Aqua di Parma candles at Fortnum’s.

Caron counter at Fortnum’s.

Caron face powders at Fortnum’s.

Caron urns at Fortnum’s.

More Caron urns at Fortnum’s.

Caron refillable bottles at Fortnum’s.

Fancy Caron packaging at Fortnum’s.

Candles at Fortnum’s.

A window display at Fortnum’s.

Miserere Paraphrase

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a truly bizarre and disturbing film. I saw it in the cinema when it first came out, in 1989.  I’d hazard a guess that this film has left a lasting impression on most people who have seen it, and I’m no exception. I’m grateful for one thing: it introduced me to the music of Michael Nyman. (EDITED: Two days after writing this post, I spotted that Film4 will screen this film on Tuesday 5th of March. If you haven’t seen it and live in the UK, here’s your chance).

Scent, safety and seduction

Burlington House, Royal Society of Chemistry

I attended the “Scentsory Question Time” organised by the British Society of Perfumers in January. Many people might not be aware that these events are open to the general public, so if you are interested in perfumery or chemistry, it’s worth keeping an eye on the event calendars of the BSP and RSC. The evening covered many topics around scent and perfumery; from our reptilian brains to fragrance safety and the controversial role of IFRA in the industry. If you want to read what happened, head over to Basenotes to read the report.

“The discussion inevitably turned into whether it’s possible to design a scent to attract the opposite sex.

Lisa Hipgrave (IFRA UK) mentioned some interesting immunology studies that have shown correlation between scent preferences and types of immunity genes expressed in the individual, leading us to seek out a partner whose own smell we find most appealing. It is therefore better for us to seek fragrances which gently enhance our natural odour fingerprint – if we’re on the pull, that is.”

Actually, the first time I learned about these immunology studies was at a BSP annual symposium, where Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool gave an engaging and surprising talk to us about the so-called “Lynx Effect”. He had conducted research which showed that the way in which female participants rated the sexual attractivemess of men was affected by how confident the scent made the man feel. The women could only see visual images. They couldn’t smell the men.

This goes to show that in some ways, the “Lynx Effect” is real – alas, not necessarily because of the way the product smells, but because of the incredibly successful brand image and advertising campaigns. If you feel confident and sexy, your appearance and body language matches this and the potential partners out there will rate you as more attractive.

Craig also told us about the immunology studies where his team had analysed body odour fingerprints (we all have a unique one) and compared these to the way in which the genes of our immune system are expressed. If you find someone’s personal body odour very attractive, it’s likely that their immune system is compatible with yours and you would produce a healthier offspring.

The Economist ran a good article on this:

As long ago as the 1950s, a perfumer called Paul Jellinek noted that several ingredients of incense resembled scents of the human body. It was not until 2001, however, that Manfred Milinski and Claus Wedekind of the University of Bern wondered whether there was a correlation between the perfume a woman preferred and her own natural scent. They found that there is.

The correlation is with the genes of what is known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This region of the genome encodes part of the immune system. It turns out that one of the most important aspects of mate choice in mammals, humans included, is to make sure that your mate’s MHC is different from your own. Mixing up MHCs makes the immune system more effective. The MHC is also thought to act as a proxy for general outbreeding, with all the hybrid vigour that can bring. Fortunately, then, evolution has equipped mammals with the ability to detect by smell chemicals whose concentrations vary with differences in the MHC of the producer.

That means people are able to sniff out suitable MHC genomes in prospective partners. A woman, for instance, will prefer the smell of T-shirts that have been worn by men whose MHC genes are appropriately different from her own. Dr Milinski and Dr Wedekind also found an association between a woman’s MHC genes and some of her preferences for perfume. Perception of musk, rose and cardamom is correlated with the MHC. Perception of castoreum and cedar is not.

Women, it seems, choose not the kind of smell they would like on a partner, or even one that might mask a nasty odour of their own, but rather something that matches their MHC. In other words, they are advertising their own scent.

We should all look for scents that enhance our natural odour in a good way. This is one of the many reasons why trying perfume on the skin and wearing it for a while is the best way to find the right scent for you.

Of course this raises one worry from a commercial point of view: is it ever a good idea to buy someone perfume as a present if they don’t already know and love the scent?

Horrible Howler

When I first heard about the recent comments made by Terry Deary, the author of Horrible Histories, I honestly thought it was satire.  Nope. Turns out that this popular children’s author really doesn’t appear to understand what libraries are for. His statements weren’t satirical. They were criminally neglectful. He says that libraries are no longer relevant. He thinks that libraries are the reason book stores are closing and he isn’t earning what he feels entitled to.

There are so many wrongheaded opinions in the Guardian article that you almost don’t know where to start. You could list rebuttals all night. Libraries are still completely relevant. Libraries are where children learn to love books and later become buying customers of his. Not everyone can afford to buy books – and denying access to culture and knowledge to those less well off is just wrong. Libraries offer free social services and act as a community hub for elderly, disabled and unemployed people. Students need free acess to reference materials (some text books cost hundreds of pounds). Small business owners might need to research trade publications that they can’t afford to subscribe to. All this and more is available for free at your local library and that’s the civilised way to go about things.

I was left almost gasping for breath at the sheer ignorance of Terry’s statements and would probably have written a rant to argue him point by point, had I not already written a piece for Public Libraries News about my local library which clearly illustrates what modern libraries are all about.

Let’s end this on the over-used but necessary quote: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Please support your local library and challenge those who would spout arrogant nonsense about this vital service. You don’t want to live in a world where everything is commercial.

A Banana Bread Interlude

Here’s what I baked last night (and had a slice of for breakfast): delicious, moist banana and walnut bread flavoured with cardamom, vanilla and caramel. The flavourings are an optional flourish (in fact, so are the walnuts) so if you just want the simplest possible version of this recipe, omit those.

Banana Bread Recipe

200g plain flour, 50g strong white bread flour
115g butter
115g soft, brown sugar
2 medium eggs
500g mashed, ripe bananas
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
A pinch of salt
Optional flourish:
100g of walnuts
Two pinches of cardamom seeds
2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
1 teaspoon of caramel flavoured syrup (I used Evilbucks Caramel Syrup)
Oven temperature: 180 Celsius
1. Combine flour, bicarb, salt, cardamom seeds and vanilla sugar in one bowl
2. Whisk the two eggs and set aside.
3. Mash the bananas and if you’re using the vanilla essence and flavoured syrup, stir these into the banana mix. Set aside.
4. Cream softened butter and brown sugar. Stir in the banana mixture and the beaten eggs. Don’t over-mix.
5. Pour the butter, sugar, banana and egg mixture into the bowl with the dry ingredients and stir gently to combine. Don’t over-mix.
6. Add the walnuts, if using.
7. Spoon the dough into a loaf tin (I used a silicone loaf mold) and bake for approximately 50 minutes. Check after 40 minutes and when you think it’s ready, stick a knife in the middle and if it comes out clean, the bread is ready.
8. Leave to cool in the dish it was baked in for about half an hour and then tip it out to a wire rack to cool. Enjoy!