Perfume Blog

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.”

read comments (0)

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.”

read comments (0)

N the realm of perfume, one man’s pudding is the next man’s tar. That the reaction to a fragrance can be visceral, and personal, is not news to Luca Turin, who over the years has inhaled and critiqued hundreds of scents. In assessing them, Mr. Turin, a scientist and fragrance expert, makes no attempt to hide his partisanship.

He describes Attrape-Coeurs, an amber violet perfume from Guerlain, as “an intense radiant Wurlitzer organ blast of rose violet and iris notes,” but paints a bleaker picture of Creed’s Love in White: “If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you’d opt to keep the lice.”

Readers react to such colorful snippets from his new book, “Perfumes: The Guide” (Viking), written with his wife, Tania Sanchez, with varying degrees of admiration and respect. Mr. Turin is, after all, a dominant voice in a chorus of critics airing their views in books and magazines and, increasingly, on the Web.

In the last half-dozen years, their opinionated chatter has become catnip to consumers, some of whom stay up until the wee hours, reading about new scents on sites like makeupalley.com, which Mr. Turin characterized as “a 24-hour pajama party.”

That chatter, however, is also the bane of the fragrance industry, which, when it comes to romancing products, has traditionally claimed the last word.

“Perfume is the only art in which there’s never been a true word spoken,” Mr. Turin said in an interview, with a directness that has made him a thorn in the side of the industry. In his book, he recalled that as little as a year ago, Le Labo, a small New York perfumer, refused to send him samples, its makers sneering that “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture.”

Today reviewers on Web sites and blogs like aromascope.com, scentzilla.com, boisdejasmin.com and perfumeposse.com have rendered that argument moot. Increasingly, critics like Robin Krug of Now Smell This, who said she has around 10,000 hits a day, and Chandler Burr, who reviews fragrance for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, cultivate a following by speaking directly to consumers, many of whom are aspiring connoisseurs themselves.

Often those shoppers collect, amassing as many as 200 bottles and vials in their homes. And many have learned to distinguish among olfactory families like fougère (fern) and gourmand (edible smells), and even to pronounce chypre (SHEE-pr, roughly), a classification based on citrus and woody notes.

As critics, they are fierce, responding to certain fragrances with rapture or, as often, with venomous contempt. A perfume like Poison, from Dior, is especially polarizing to bloggers, many of whom are stay-at-home moms or professionals in other fields. An enthusiast on Now Smell This described Poison as “a warm, luxurious velvet blanket draped across a satin settee. On the same site, the perfume was assailed as “a railroad spike through the brain.”

Black Orchid from Tom Ford was praised as “melting cupcakes on hot skin.” But a detractor called it “aged Romano in a carnivorous orchid hothouse.”

When they wish to be especially withering, bloggers designate a scent as a “scrubber,” the kind of smell you can’t wash off fast enough.

Their enthusiasm, though, can be infectious. Online scent aficionados have become a force to be reckoned with in the $2.9 billion high-end fragrance industry, which has had a slight decline in sales since 2007. Their interest in mostly unadvertised, limited-distribution brands has helped drive niche sales in 2007 to $253 million, a rise of 19 percent, said Karen Grant, the senior beauty analyst of the market research firm NPD. Niche brands have doubled in volume since 2005, accounting for 9 percent of sales, Ms. Grant said.

Not surprisingly, these critics’ uncensored comments have been anathema to the Estée Lauders and Cotys of the world, industry giants that have relied almost exclusively on advertising and glowing magazine commentary to spread their message and spur sales.

“No question, the industry people are unnerved,” said Rochelle R. Bloom, the president of the Fragrance Foundation, a trade group. “I often get calls from executives pleading, ‘Can’t you do something about all this chatter.’ ”

Yet traditional marketing does not address consumer desire to learn about the dizzying number of annual fragrance introductions — up from 300 ten years ago to more than 1,000 last year, according to NPD.

“In their marketing, mainstream perfumers have lost control, and that puts a lot of pressure on them,” said Allan Mottus, the editor of The Informationist, a cosmetics and fragrance trade magazine. He added that mass and high-end brands, as well as fragrance producers and suppliers like Givaudan and Symrise, are “just waking up to the news that they can’t own the customer.”

The explicit advertising for Tom Ford’s new men’s fragrance, which shows an amber-colored bottle wedged between a woman’s naked thighs, will likely have no impact on Richard Saja, an artist and embroiderer who stood inhaling fragrances at Bergdorf Goodman on Saturday morning. “I don’t care about perfume advertising or the bottle it comes in,” Mr. Saja said. “For me perfume is a visceral experience,” one that is deepened, he added, by scanning sites like sniffapalooza.com, an organizer, with several New York retailers, of a weekend of sniffing and sampling.

“Three years ago, this was a world I hadn’t explored,” he said. “But now the Web has demystified so much of the world of fragrances for me.”

Mr. Saja was among some 200 customers swarming the Bergdorf fragrance floor that day. Shoppers from London, Berlin and Piscataway, N.J., poked their noses into bottles, sniffed scent strips and inhaled deep draughts from decanters. Some parted with as much as $200 for a flacon of Sycomore, a new offering from Chanel.

Enthusiasts included Christine Jelley, the chief executive of a surge-protection gear maker. Swayed by blogs, she was intent on exploring new violet-scented offerings from Serge Lutens and Annick Goutal. “When someone becomes rhapsodic about a scent,” she said, “I want to see what they’re seeing in it.”

Kevin Saunders, an art therapist circling the Lutens and Jo Malone counter, is an occasional reader of basenotes.net and Now Smell This. Mr. Saunders carries with him on an iPod a list of scents he has read about, some to be sampled, others to buy. “At the least,” he said, “those blogs may prompt me into trying something.”

And there are signs that the industry is responding to Mr. Saunders and his online cohort. “Today you see more bloggers being invited to traditional press events, and a greater awareness among executives of emerging forms of media,” Jenny B. Fine, the editor of the trade journal WWD Beauty Biz, noted.

Marianne Diorio, a spokeswoman for Estée Lauder, acknowledged as much: “In the beginning we were nervous about the blogs. As with any new media, there were mixed emotions.” Pointedly, she added, “Now we could never think of launching a fragrance without contacting the bloggers.” The company engages in dialogues with critics, she said, and advertises some of its fragrances on sites like Now Smell This.

Firmenich, a producer and supplier of fragrances, operates osMoz.com, which made its debut in 2001 and claims 300,000 members. In recent months, the company has encouraged readers to share information and to rate fragrances, its own and others, Julien Levy, the site’s marketing director, said.

Commentators on coty.com prompted Coty, which makes fragrances by David Beckham and Jennifer Lopez, among others, to think of reissuing its greatest hits, scents like Emeraude and L’Origan, said Stephen C. Mormoris, a senior vice president of global marketing.

Such developments cannot come soon enough for Tania Sanchez. In “Perfumes: The Guide,” she chided that the perfume industry “hasn’t yet figured out the benefits or relaxing control.” She told of a prominent blogger threatened with a lawsuit by a perfume company because she had deemed its product only “O.K.,” and “a little disappointing.”

“When a sleek luxury goods company unleashes its lawyers on a suburban mom for not liking their new fragrance,” Ms. Sanchez wrote, “we know the world is changing.”

read comments (0)