Perfume is expensive, eau de toilette, aftershave whatever you are buying. I don't travel abroad, so if I'm lucky, I receive a bottle of perfume to last the year. Still Calvin Klein Eternity from my mum, because that is the last one she remembers me wearing, and Coco Chanel Mademoiselle from my father in law because he was instructed to buy that for me once. (I love that, but one of our senior managers wears a lot of it and you can tell if she's in her office or not from the smell in the corridor so I've gone off that a bit.) My darling Dan was metrosexual before the term was first coined, he virtually invented the term male grooming and seems to get through a bottle a month. Not Coco Chanel, that would be weird, nor any Chanel as I have never yet been able to afford to treat him to that.
It is a tiny bit strange advertising fragrance on the television, surely we buy it for the smell which currently cannot be conveyed through the visual medium, and I find it so hard to believe that we are sold an image that is more important than the smell. All the bottles end up looking the same in the shop anyway don't they? And whatever you spray on a tiny scrap of card smells completely different when you have accidentally put it through the washing machine the next day.
It is even tricky to talk about. How do you describe a scent? It ends up sounding like a pretentious wine description on the shelf of a supermarket "with undertones of cinnamon and the sunshine in an early evening bower". I always use the word "smell" when I am introducing the idea of language change in English; write down as many words as you can think of which are synonyms for smell. Now classify them into good and bad. Most of the bad ones have Anglo Saxon roots (stench, stink) whereas the positive associations are with words of French origin (scent, perfume) coming in after 1066 and associated with the middle classes. Typically,we have kept all the nouns we can find in English, making it just so important to find exactly the right words and make sure than we can identify all non-native speakers.
All of which makes the concept behind many perfume companies' advertising even more completely baffling. They are almost always inappropriately glamorous with ludicrously young couples doing stupidly attractive things. There is a Johnny Depp one this year that may ruin many of my favourite films which suggests independence and the open road, I always imagined Johnny Depp would smell rather musty.
The collection I have tried to avoid paying any attention to this year includes a woman rapturously clutching a perfume bottle while she writhes on the floor, perhaps making love to an invisible and nicely perfumed man. Because...why? Buy a woman perfume and she'll put on a sex show for you? I don't get it. Then there's a very pretty Greek sort of goddess woman who catches some Greekish mortal men with no knickers on and gives the camera an arch kind of look, because everyone knows there is nothing more attractive to a woman than mens' cocks. And some of these may be famous Greek gods or footballers, if it's not David Beckham then I'm struggling with names.
The worst one I've seen is another Adonis type, although he might be a little bit more Norse in his godlike status, there seem to be lots of mountains and storms in black and white behind him. Now I wasn't watching this one too carefully, I'll be honest. Television in general is a time for me to catch up on my emails and I frequently get requests from my husband to stop working, but the gist of it seemed to result in him returning to his changing room after a feat of extreme physical prowess and being presented with, presumably as part of his winnings, a crowd of semi naked women.
It makes me yearn for the heroin chic of the Calvin Klein campaign of 1994 or so, with Kate Moss and a number of androgynously skinny models in black and white who were so sexy they could have been having sex with the whole crowd or themselves, or just the nearest person - I slightly forget the point of the advert but the point was they all smelt the same. Although male grooming is now seen as acceptable if not essential, as the standards are raised for men to be allowed to behave more like women, it has only seemed to raise the bar for women who still have to be that little bit more groomed than men. And smell nice. And be so highly sexed that a bottle of perfume leaves them writhing on the floor with unfulfilled lust that you - yes you, presumably male audience, could satisfy simply by stepping into the picture. And sit around waiting until he has finished his sports just to... I have no idea... lick him clean?
Happy Christmas everyone and a fresh and pleasantly scented new year to you. I'll be crushing up rose petals in summer to make my own scent. Tweet me your recipes. @housefeminist
