Perfume Blog

Author, investigative journalist and researcher Chandler Burr, 44, is The New York Times’ perfume critic. His is the only column of its kind in North America to scrutinize and rate fragrances as critically as the Michelin Guide does restaurants. His latest book, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris & New York, is published by Henry Holt & Company.

Q: What is the mission of your Scent Strip column?

A: When it came out, Stefano Tonchi (Times style guru) said that The New York Times would be the first publication in the United States to treat perfume as a true, full art. Just as one would treat painting, music, food, wine, these are all creative art forms that have their critics….Stefano understood that perfume needs its own truly independent critical apparatus.

Q: You’re an accomplished author who can fluently speak four languages. Did you ever think you’d be walking around New York with Sarah Jessica Parker talking about perfumes?

A: No, I certainly didn’t…(but) I grew up in Washington, D.C., in an upper-middle-class area where there were a lot of kids with famous parents and that sort of thing. The secretary of defence actually lived down the street from us. So I was sort of used to (celebrity).

Q: You seem to get some flak for the way you describe perfumes such as Diorella smelling like “a new fur coat that has been rubbed with a very creamy mint toothpaste. Not gel. Paste. It is a great, great fragrance….” Why do you write this way?

A: Using terms like floral, woody, fruity means almost nothing. From an aesthetic point of view and even an intellectual point of view, there is almost no content. They are zero-calorie terms….The (perfume) reflects the artist’s intellectual, aesthetic and artistic intentions. Those intentions are what we criticize. Is the work successful? New? Innovative? Beautiful? Striking? Familiar? Disturbing? Does it illicit emotion? Metaphor is the only interesting and effective way of describing the experience of that art.

Q: What is your favourite scent?

A: Obviously, I have a million of them. But if you forced me to choose one it would be a carbon dioxide distillation of baby carrot from a company called Firmenich.

Q: Is it wrong when men wear women’s fragrances?

A: It’s totally right. Most masculines are crap….I call it the masculine cliché. Every version of the masculine cliché smells the same. It’s a little citrus, throw in a little spice, throw in some metallic tin can and that’s it.

They are all the same and smell like they should be sold in drugstores for putting on under armpits. They are garbage.

Q: Scents usually cause emotional reactions in your writing. Has a fragrance ever caused a physical reaction?

A: I am not a particular fan of sentimentality. I don’t like drama. Or exaggeration. But when Chanel No. 22 was relaunched, I actually, very briefly, began to cry because my mother wore it. I have a very strong memory of her dressed up with makeup, a ring and pearl necklace ready to go to a party and me at 5, 6, 7, having to go to bed, hating it and her kissing me goodnight and remembering the scent of her perfume.

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Heard about Chanel conjuring up an ad campaign featuring Harry Potter star Emma Watson? Just an illusion.

A rep for Chanel tells E! News that widespread Internet reports, fueled in part by a story in Britain’s Daily Mirror, that the 18-year-old actress was set to pocket a $6 million payday for pushing Coco Mademoiselle perfume are “just a rumor”: “It’s false.”

Per the erroneous reports, Watson, famed for playing loyal pal Hermione Granger in the Potter franchise, supposedly inked a two-year deal and would replace Keira Knightley.

The rep says she has no idea where the rumor got started. MSNBC, attributing its version of the story to “a source close to Watson,” claimed the deal would give the actress financial security (as if she doesn’t have that already costarring in Warner Bros.’ billion-dollar movie series).

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, said the deal would be announced next month and that Watson had been bragging to friends.

There was no immediate comment from Watson’s camp.

In case you missed it, Chanel’s latest advertising campaign for the popular fragrance features the 23-year-old Knightley covering her naked bosom with a bowler hat.

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The Emporio Armani Red perfumes for men and women raise an interesting question: when it comes to perfume, can you smell ethical?

These perfumes are part of the Red campaign that channels part of the profits from products bearing the symbol into aid for African women and children with HIV/AIDS. The packaging is environmentally friendly, the red graphics are by the Ghanaian artist Owusu-Ankomah and money goes to an impeccable cause.

Other thoughts linger, far longer than the strongest scent, however. Given that these and most perfumes contain mostly synthetic ingredients, does that make them more, or less, ethical?

Synthetic scent molecules have been poured into revolutionary fragrances from Chanel, Guerlain and Christian Dior since the perfumery business kicked into high gear in the 1920s and ’30s.

In the late-19th century, volatile solvents were used to extract materials from ground plants for bottled scents. As Jean-Claude Ellena writes in his recently published handbook, Perfume: “By the end of the 1930s, the major synthetic products used today had been discovered … Today one-third of my collection [of materials] consists of natural products and two-thirds of synthetic products.” This from the man who is the nose of Hermes, a company not shy of using expensive ingredients.

Top-grade natural materials such as rose and jasmine are expensive to harvest and harder to find. As for ingredients such as ambergris or civet or musk, which used to be extracted painfully and often fatally from animals, a perfume maker would no sooner use a threatened species than hunt a Siberian tiger.

“It has become impossible to continue to use rare and endangered species,” says Frank Breen, the managing director of Australian distributor Cosmax, who has a raft of prestige perfume in his portfolio, including Bulgari, Issey Miyake, Lanvin and Van Cleef & Arpels.

“Civet, for example, nobody today would use civet; I don’t know of any fragrance that [uses natural] musk, they use synthetics. They don’t use [natural] ambergris any more. There are fragrance makers who will tell you they no longer wish to use any form of natural product that is endangered or too difficult to distil. [Perfume] is essentially a harvested product or a synthetic.”

Economics and ethics have stopped endangered species from turning up in perfume formulas. Still, there’s a romance about natural ingredients. A scent molecule extracted from the natural environment is regarded more sympathetically than a scent molecule created in an artificial environment - and somehow seen as, well, instantly more ethical.

Four years ago, a boutique Californian perfume maker captured press coverage by claiming that it “uses extracts from organically farmed plants and flowers from all corners of the world including davana from India, rose from Bulgaria and Turkey, vanilla from Madagascar, citrus from Brazil, spices from east African and orris from Albania”.

Nothing is mentioned about the conditions under which people produced these ingredients, the notion of fair trade or the distances they’ve travelled. Australians buy these US or European-manufactured luxuries with massive carbon kilometres tacked on to them.

Then there is the impact of harvesting these crops. Sandalwood oil comes from a tropical hardwood tree, Santalum album, which grows mainly in Asia and the Indian subcontinent. This soothing, warm oil has been in such high demand by the fragrance and aromatherapy industries that illegal harvesting and processing are rife.

Indonesian and Indian sandalwood forests have been ravaged, production has plummeted and prices have skyrocketed, reaching a high of $US1700 ($1773) a kilogram, before dropping back to $US1250 in February.

The world’s major fragrance manufacturers, Givaudan, IFF, Firmenich and Robertet, “delisted” Indian sandalwood and refused to buy it.

Ironically, this lamentable situation has benefited a burgeoning business in Western Australia. Mount Romance grows plantation sandalwood and processes the exotic hardwood into oil. The Albany company has penetrated the global luxury market, securing contracts with the world’s largest suppliers of perfume [see box].

As Kim Bleimann, president of Berje, a supplier of essential oils to the perfume industry, said last year: “We have not met a perfumer who could substitute it [Australian sandalwood oil] per se. But it is being used in conjunction with the myriad synthetic sandalwood chemicals, quite successfully, replacing the real thing probably forever.”

So how dangerous are synthetic processes and materials? Every molecule that comes out of a fragrance laboratory goes through toxicology tests and has to comply with regulations set by the Australian cosmetics regulator, the National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme.

Then there is the controversial Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals legislation passed by the European Parliament in 2005 which has banned 26 fragrance allergens.

The British organisation Cropwatch has been campaigning for some years to reverse the “26 allergens” legislation, founded as it is on “bad science”. Tony Burfield, from Cropwatch and the Natural Perfumers Guild, maintains that not all 26 bear the same risk and cites studies that criticise the European Commission for treating them all as equal.

It’s not only the synthetics that cause these reactions, so do natural materials. Sixteen of the 26 banned materials also occur in complex biological substances. Oakmoss, for instance, has been replaced by lookalike laboratory-generated molecules, causing a furore among perfume fans who value its enigmatic presence in the classics.

The furore goes beyond olfactory aesthetics. The battle lines are drawn between various competing interests in the aroma industry, from toxicologists to the aromatherapy practitioners. This legislation affects even manufacturers of natural products. No brand boasting of its clean green credentials wants to list chemical names such as linalool and citral on the label of a product that claims to be natural.

As Helen Feygin, head of Intuiscent, an independent US fragrance developer, wrote in the online trade magazine Perfumer & Flavorist: “This alone eliminates a whole range of essential oils from the perfumer’s palette. Even if the ingredient is a natural constituent of the oil, it needs to be listed.”

It doesn’t help that the perfume industry is as secretive as Opus Dei, guarding its formulas and never bound to full disclosure.

Look at the box from your favourite fragrance (the bottle is unsullied by chemical names). Words such as citronellol, geraniol, ethylhexyl salicylate, hexyl cinnamyl, red 33 CI 60730 and blue 1 CI 42090 will appear. But the list will be incomplete. There is the mysterious word “parfum”.

This is legal under the EU Cosmetics Regulation. The European Cosmetic, Toiletry and Perfumery Association says it would be impractical to list the hundreds of constituents of a cosmetic product. It argues these ingredients are present only in low concentrations and, as the specific fragrance allergens are listed, this is enough.

All of which dovetails very nicely with the other reality: a list of chemicals and percentages on the side of a bottle would destroy the mystique and the romance of the perfume.

Or would it? Surely sophisticated consumers are savvy enough to know how their smell is concocted.

There is also the fear of copycats and counterfeits in a business that never deals in less than millions of dollars. High-tech laboratories and a booming fake trade have already made that a reality.

No wonder that not one major perfume house has yet taken the plunge and gone for complete transparency in its labelling like the food companies, though there is an interesting marketing ploy from Prada.

The iconoclastic brand’s latest offering, Infusion d’Iris, has a label pasted on the side of its bottle that reads like a combination of a travelogue and ingredients list. Ultimately, however, we are no wiser, merely entranced.

The scent of local success

THE devastation of the Indian and Asian sandalwood forests has had an unforeseen benefit for a West Australian business called Mount Romance.

Dubbed “wooden gold” as prices for the soothing oil soar, Indian sandalwood has seen demand outstrip supply and proved a windfall for Mount Romance’s subsidiary, the Australian Sandalwood Oil Company.

In 1997, the subsidiary renegotiated a contract with the WA Government to harvest wild and plantation trees, and process the wood and export it overseas.

However, until recently, Australian sandalwood was not considered good enough for the fine fragrance industry. The local tree, Santalum spicatum, is a different species to the prized Indian hardwood, Santalum album, and contains lower levels of santalols, the key ingredient.

Where there is a need, there is a way, however. Technological advances in synthetic molecules have successfully combined with the Australian natural oil to mimic the “real thing”.

Mount Romance has secured contracts with five of the six major perfume houses, Givaudan, Quest, Firmenich, Robertet and IFF, the world’s largest suppliers of perfumes, according to David Brocklehurst, the general manager of Mount Romance.

The partnership between Mount Romance and Givaudan is emblematic of the green direction that these companies are heading in.

The Swiss multinational fragrance producer has programs in place to fund sustainable projects for the production of raw materials such as the tonka bean in Venezuela.

Sceptics regard it as greenwash, an exercise in marketing.

There’s no doubt, however, that these companies have to address issues of carbon footprint, packaging, waste reduction, recycling and energy conservation.

“I think that at this point companies want to ensure that if they are ever checked they can show that they are being ethically aware,” Brocklehurst says.

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Sycomore is the only new addition to Chanel’s premium Les Exclusifs range ($240 for 200ml eau de toilette, exclusively at select Chanel boutiques in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver) released last year, of which the elegant oriental Coromandel was a particular hit. For the unisex Sycomore, in-house perfumer Jacques Polge was inspired by Mademoiselle Chanel and Ernest Beaux’s short-lived woody fragrance by that name of 1930, although Polge, with deputy perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, has stripped his creation of its original floral references. The press release lists vetiver woven in with sandalwood, cypress, juniper and pink pepper notes and calls it, “balsamic and earthy, warm and enveloping, radical and infinitely subtle.”

He Says:
Vetiver and sandalwood are common ingredients in modern fragrances, but the addition of juniper and cypress gives this fragrance an almost antiseptic quality – clean and crisp. I like that fact that it doesn’t smell like anything on the market right now. That will appeal to someone looking for a unique signature fragrance. 4 / 4 noses

She Says:
The main note is vetiver, a pungent Indian grass, and it comes across as dry as bark. I can honestly say I smell the hallowed, incense-aged wood of an ancient Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine. There’s smoke, too, and cedar, but it’s stripped down, as modern and minimalist as the plain bottle it comes in. Subtle and unusual, Sycomore is the fragrance embodiment of what Paul Poiret once sniffed about Mademoiselle’s sober little black dresses: “misérabilisme de luxe.” 3.5 / 4 noses

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The other night, I downloaded Love and a Molotov Cocktail by the Flys. It’s a raucous little ditty I hadn’t heard since the days I was in a ‘critically overlooked’ band, and we used it to warm up. So in a way, I was downloading a memory. And it struck me that MP3s are quite as nebulous as a memory or an idea. They are music distilled to its purest form, compressed files of data, lots of ones and zeros. The connection they make with you operates on one level and one level only - the sonic.

And yet even now I vividly remember the rather battered cover of that single. It sported a kaleidoscopic pattern in black and white, which made your eyes hurt if you stared at it, with the bright green band logo set at a jaunty angle in a corner. Being somewhat strapped for cash, we used to take it home in turns so we could learn our bits before the next rehearsal.

Because this unassuming piece of seven-inch vinyl was a tactile object, it somehow had a tangible worth. Tussling over an MP3 file is a physical impossibility, and it would be the work of a moment to duplicate another. It wasn’t only the music, it was also the material form and the presentation that made the Flys’ finest hour so special. The whole package, in other words.

All of which made me think that packaging is much maligned and misunderstood at the moment. It’s seen as wasteful and gratuitous, a decadent indulgence that’s destroying the planet. There seems to be a movement afoot to banish it all together - to outlaw bags, bottles and boxes, sleeves, slip-cases and Cellophane. But there’s a real difference between packaging and over-packaging. Where it’s a functional necessity, there’s no reason it can’t be designed intelligently to bring an extra dimension to a product. Without the guilt trip. Often, packaging is part of a product experience, rather than an extravagant add-on. You accept that you’re probably paying for it, but it’s an aesthetic treat, part of the overall deal.

If there was a way of cleanly dispensing perfume via the bathroom mirror or TV screen, would the idea take off? I have my doubts. Perhaps you could buy your clothes already permeated with your favourite scent. Or maybe not. It’s just too clinical, too anonymous. Part of the inherent allure of perfume is the bottle - from Coco Chanel’s iconic container based on the shape of the Place Vendôme, to Jean-Paul Gaultier’s corseted glass torsos. They tickle your visual sensibility, or make you smile while you’re enjoying the smell - a two-pronged sensory attack. They’re small, recyclable and last for months, so they’re hardly ecoffensive.

Packaging creates character and differentiation. Without it, everything is reduced to a generic. If supermarket shelves were stacked with row upon row of brown, compostable paper bags containing everything from soap powder to spaghetti, what a grey/ brown old world we’d live in.

It’s laudable that brands like Kiehl’s and The Body Shop use ordinary-looking recyclable, refillable plastic bottles, but this is actually an anti-design statement, a calculated part of their positioning strategy. But then an eco-friendly plastic specimen bottle wouldn’t be the appropriate vessel for a 12-year-old malt whisky from Islay.

Let’s face it, we religiously ‘package’ ourselves every day when we pick out what clothes to wear. If outward appearances are really so shallow, we’d all be walking around naked. Now that really is a scary thought.

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The Oscars of the fragrance industry - the FiFi Awards - honored the top fragrances and the people behind them on Tuesday, May 20 at their 36th annual celebration in New York.

Daisy by Marc Jacobs, a Coty Prestige fragrance, won Fragrance of the Year in the women’s luxury category, while Dolce & Gabanna Light Blue Pour Homme (P&G Prestige Products, Inc.) took home the same award in the men’s category. A women’s and men’s “Nouveau Niche” award was given to Prada Infusion d’Iris (Puig Beauty and Fashion Group) and Armani Prive Vetiver Babylone (Giorgio Armani Beauty), respectively.

Designer Vera Wang was honored with a Hall of Fame award, presented by New York Ranger Sean Avery and current Vogue intern, where Wang was once a fashion editor. Did Avery think hockey or fashion was more vicious? “That’s an interesting question,” laughed Avery. “I would definitely say hockey. I think fashion is certainly tough and competitive, but it’s definitely not as physically dangerous as hockey.”

Wang was humbled to be receiving the award.

“It’s something beyond my dreams,” Wang said. “My mother adored fragrance, she educated me in fragrance. We lived in Paris a great deal throughout my life, so fragrance has been a part of my upbringing. But to somehow win an award for fragrance - a Hall of Fame award - is inconceivable to me.”

As for Wang’s own future fragrance plans - currently she has four fragrances for women and one eau de toilette for men - she’d like to do a line of essential oils, “where price is not an issue at all and it’s just a totally luxurious product,” she said.

Scent, and particular perfumes, are often the basis for some of the most powerful memories. Actress Bernadette Peters recalled her first fragrance memory.

“My earliest fragrance memory was of my mother’s,” said Peters. “She wore Arpege, so when I look at a Lanvin purse, I look for that little lady that they sometimes hang from a medallion, because I remember that used to be on the bottle. She always wore perfume. There was something called Sen-Sen that you put under your tongue. It’s another fragrance that you put in your mouth, and then your breath smells sweet. Sometimes when she was out of Sen-Sen she’d put perfume in her mouth!”

Designer Zac Posen, who will release his first fragrance for women in December and is also working on a fragrance for men, remembered certain packaging first and foremost - something often more interesting than the smell of fragrances themselves.

“I remember an Elsa Peretti bottle, I think she designed it for Halston, it was a really cool shape,” he said. “Then I went through a stage of collecting great, really kitsch perfume bottles of Avon.”

“The first fragrance I purchased was probably Obsession,” continued Posen. “That’s a young, undiscovered gay boy’s idea of sexuality or sensuality.”

Tradition goes hand-in-hand with fragrance, whether you’re a young girl surrounded by great Parisian fragrances, like Wang was, or a New York kid like Posen making his first discoveries of the nature of sensuousness.

“Patou, Chanel, Balmain, Dior, Guerlain - they were legacies!” said Wang. “They influenced generations of women. Their grandmother wore them, their mother wore them, their daughters wear it. I think it’s a bit of that tradition of fragrance that I really got to enjoy, and that’s what I enjoy so much about doing fragrance.”

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By CHANDLER BURR

One of China’s hottest sellers is a nonessential Western luxury product that the Chinese have historically never bought and that has virtually no Chinese cultural roots: perfume.

With perfume sales in much of the rest of the world slowing or declining, the industry, primarily based in Paris and New York, hopes for significant growth in China. The market there remains small, though sales are rising exponentially. Nobody knows the exact growth rate, but Patrick de Lambilly, the vice president for Asia for Coty, says, “You can see 20, 30, and 40 percent a year.”

Alexandre de Chaudenay, Asia-Pacific managing director of the perfume licensee Beauté Prestige International, said, “I’d say 20 to 40 percent seems correct, but the figures are extremely difficult, and people tell you anything.”

Still, even if the Chinese market is potentially hugely lucrative, doing business there is far from easy. The regulatory system is uncertain. The complexity of its bureaucracy is daunting. The department stores are of varying quality, and because Chinese tastes are changing rapidly, a store that attracts crowds one day can be deserted the next.

To add to the uncertainty, many in the business say the concept of perfume is so new that a lot of Chinese consumers are, in fact, not buying a perfume but rather the brand to which a bottle of perfume happens to be attached. “China is about brand, brand, brand,” Mr. de Chaudenay said.

And the importance of brand raises the question of the market’s future stability. Although many in the industry talk about the strength of the luxury brands in China, “Are those brands’ perfumes selling well?” Mr. de Chaudenay asked. “I think so. Are the consumers coming back? We don’t know.”

For that reason, Mr. de Lambilly says his perfume company and others are tempering their enthusiasm for the Chinese market with realism. “We’re learning as we go,” he said. “Particularly in fragrances. All of us here are doing the same thing: getting data from the marketing sources, comparing it to other sources, trying to figure it out.”

Hans Wohmann, head of Procter & Gamble’s Asian operations for scent, said sales in China of what are known as “prestige fragrances” — perfumes made by designers and luxury houses like Chanel, Estée Lauder and Dior — were around $120 million versus the $9 billion European market or the $4 billion American market. Even the Japanese market, the largest in Asia, was $500 million in 2006.

As Mr. Wohmann put it, “So 20 percent of the world’s population has only 1 percent of the global fine fragrance market.”

Perfume is a relatively recent phenomenon in China. Mr. de Lambilly said the Chinese started using scented shower products only in the early 20th century. But they were light and simple, he said. “They were for freshening the body and also to avoid mosquitoes.”

Western-type perfumes have been produced in China only since the mid-1980s, said Bill Jin, manager at the PearlChem Corporation in Parsippany, N.J., an importer and distributor of perfume raw materials.

Ralf Ritter, a consultant to the scent maker Takasago, said he would be “surprised if even 50 percent of the perfume bought in China was actually used.” And that, he said, is largely because in China fragrances serve multiple purposes. “They’re fragrances, but they also repel mosquitoes, they have moisturizing properties, and they are used in the summer to freshen up,” he said. “Chinese consumers care that the product does more than just fragrance the body.”

Mr. Jin says there are a just a few local perfume brands. Pearlscent, the sister company of Mr. Jin’s company, based in Guangzhou, is one. “The fragrance concentrates are mainly created by our customers in the U.S. or France and imported from the U.S.A. or Europe.” They are then mixed with alcohol, bottled and sold in China.

Mr. Jin adds that there is virtually universal agreement that Chinese brands will not pose serious competition to Western brands until well in the future. “High-end brands like Dior and Chanel will be for the prestige consumer, which is completely different from the local brand market,” he said. “One bottle of Chanel perfume will cost almost a half month pay for a fresh-out-of-college student.”

Coty entered China, via its Chinese distributor, ADE China, in 2000, immediately establishing Davidoff and its flagship scent, Cool Water, which, Mr. de Lambilly said, is a strong seller. Coty introduced Calvin Klein perfumes in 2006, and that brand is now Coty’s leader. “CK One is obviously very strong,” he said, “and N2U did very well because it fits very well with the young high-tech mentality of the Chinese.”

Jennifer Lopez, which Coty introduced in 2002, is doing well, and the company has introduced Sarah Jessica Parker’s perfume brand, though Mr. de Lambilly said, “Celebrity brands are not doing that well in Asia.”

Kenzo has been in China for more than a decade and, having developed a stable department store business in the main cities, is now moving into secondary cities. B.P.I. introduced its Issey Miyake and Jean-Paul Gaultier brands in China two years ago.

“We began in Beijing and Shanghai with limited distribution,” Mr. de Chaudenay said, “building up our counters and our visibility with a flagship strategy: we invest more in the point of sale than in media.” In the next three years, B.P.I. plans to start selling its brands in 160 department stores in China’s 20 biggest cities.

Inefficiencies, bureaucratic complexities and the major capital investments needed for setting up a subsidiary have made partnerships with Chinese distributors the norm.

“For regulation concerns, China is still one of the most difficult countries to register your product,” says Sung Kim, regional director for the Asia Pacific Region for Kenzo Parfums. “You need to register for both sales and hygiene. It takes about two months per product, and there is no guarantee that approval will be granted by the authorities.”

Luciano Bertinelli, managing director of Salvatore Ferragamo Perfums, said his company also relied on its Chinese partner to distribute its products. He added, “It is today almost impossible to negotiate China by yourself.” Like Coty, Ferragamo also chose ADE, a 10-year-old company owned and led by May Zhang that works principally on perfume.

The question of which perfumes to offer the Chinese consumer is perhaps the trickiest one. Kenzo, with two huge successes in the Chinese market — Flower by Kenzo and Kenzo Amour — plans to develop perfumes specifically for Chinese tastes. “The Chinese cannot accept strong fragrances,” Mr. Kim of Kenzo said. “They prefer the scent to be more floral for women and more fresh for men.” He said the Chinese also preferred the less concentrated eaux de toilette.

When Prada introduced its original Prada perfume — a powerful, rich patchouli amber — to the Japanese, South Korean and Hong Kong markets, those consumers found it too strong, the company said. So in China, Prada chose instead to introduce Prada Tendre, a much lighter, cleaner version, in March 2007. Prada said the scent was doing well.

Because the brand’s new clean citrus-tinted Infusion d’Iris perfume is proving to be even bigger in Asian markets outside of China than Tendre, the company is hoping for a big hit on the mainland, where Infusion will be introduced this summer.

Mr. de Chaudenay says that companies are not only investing huge sums in getting into the Chinese market, they have accepted huge losses for a long time.

“Your store is good, and the next day a new store opens next door and you lose all your traffic,” Mr. de Chaudenay said. “You’ve invested in your counter, and now your counter is dead. You have to be aware where the market is moving, and it’s moving fast. Very few brands are making money in China, and I mean in all categories.”

But, he added: “We are buying market share. We will get the profits tomorrow.”

Some major Western brands are treading cautiously. Parfums Givenchy, a major perfume brand of the European luxury giant LVMH, is not yet a presence in China. “The Chinese perfume market is tiny,” said Alain Lorenzo, president of Givenchy Parfums. He said Givenchy was concentrating on the much larger markets for makeup and skin care. “Once we hold a big position in these segments, we will start looking at how to develop perfume as well.”

Mr. Ritter said China was also maturing quickly in regulatory terms, rising toward international standards on allergens and toxicity.

That only means that international brands will try harder to reach Chinese consumers. “I strongly believe that perfume will become more and more attractive to them,” Mr. de Chaudenay said. “China is going to be so big that no one will be able to avoid being in China. We are going there for the long term. We have very ambitious plans.”

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Luxury perfume signs chic French actress Audrey Tautou

Botox addicts, beware. OD’ing on rat-poison injections could be harmful to your modeling career. Just ask actress Nicole Kidman, who’s being dumped as the face of Chanel No. 5.

The luxury perfume line has named gamine Amelie star Audrey Tautou to replace the pregnant 40-year-old Kidman as their new spokesmodel, beginning in 2009.

Kidman, who has been the face of Chanel No. 5 since 2004, reportedly earned $3.7 million for a three-minute commercial spot directed by acclaimed Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann–making her the world record holder for the most money paid per minute to an actor.

The 29-year-old French-born Tautou previously starred in The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks. She now joins an elite group of Chanel No. 5 spokesmodels, including iconic sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve .

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From their Paris offices Chanel have announced that French actress Audrey Tatou will replace Nicole Kidman as the new face of Chanel No. 5, one of the fashion house’s most iconic scents.

A new ad campaign and television commercial will be shot by Jean -Pierre Jeunet, the man who directed Tatou in her oscar nominated role in the film Amelie.

And after the last, spectacular No.5 ad, which had Nicole Kidman starring in a 5 minute mini film directed by her Moulin Rouge director Baz Lurhman we’re expecting something wonderful!

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