Perfume Blog

Estee Lauder Cos Inc on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit against CVS Caremark Corp, Family Dollar Stores Inc and a Brooklyn-based fragrance maker, claiming the stores have sold knock-offs of its brands.

The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan accused CVS and Family Dollar of offering imitation products, made by Preferred Fragrance Inc, that used their actual registered trademarks or confusingly similar names.

Estee Lauder and its Clinique Laboratories unit took particular issue with titles like “Impression of Happy by Clinique” and “Impression of Beautiful by Estee Lauder.”

The suit accused the stores and perfume maker of trademark infringement, false advertising, diluting their trademarks and unfair competition.

It is seeking an injunction preventing the defendants from buying or selling the products, and damages of up to $1 million for each type of knock-off.

Representatives for Family Dollar and Preferred Fragrance did not immediately return calls seeking comment. A spokesman for CVS said the company had not been served with the suit and would not comment on pending litigation.

Preferred Fragrance was also sued by Estee Lauder rival Elizabeth Arden Inc in a similar 2005 lawsuit in Ohio federal court, though Elizabeth Arden later dropped the suit.

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Of course, it is ridiculous. What sane person would put metal rings round her neck to stretch it like a giraffe’s, or lace her corset so tight that she fainted, or allow her feet to be bound to make them tiny? How backward, how primitive. Completely different, obviously, from the woman who pays huge sums to have her breasts surgically enlarged; or the man who takes drugs to give him an athlete’s torso; or the rich, modern men and women who spend billions a year on beauty products whose impact on the appearance is sometimes, um, unproven. From stilettos to diets to cosmetic surgery, women (and, increasingly, men) go to great lengths and huge cost to make themselves better looking. And now, advances in technology allow people to change their appearance not just for an evening out but for ever.
It has always been thus. Medieval noblewomen swallowed arsenic and dabbed on bats’ blood to improve their complexions; 18th-century Americans prized the warm urine of young boys to erase their freckles; Victorian ladies removed their ribs to give themselves a wasp waist. The desire to be beautiful is as old as civilization, as is the pain that it can cause. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin noted a “universal passion for adornment”, often involving “wonderfully great” suffering.
The pain has not stopped the passion from creating a global industry encompassing make-up, skin and hair care, fragrances, cosmetic surgery, health clubs and diet pills. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education. Such spending is not mere vanity. Being pretty—or just not ugly—confers enormous genetic and social advantages. Attractive people (both men and women) are judged to be more intelligent and better in bed; they earn more, and they are more likely to marry.
The beauty industry has always played on the fear of looking ugly as much as on the pleasure of looking beautiful, drawing on the science of psychology to convince women that an inferiority complex could be cured by a dab of lipstick. A pioneer of the beauty business was Estee Lauder, who died in 2004. At the time of her death a number of newspapers thought she was 97. Others averred that she was 95. Most agreed that, until a broken hip slowed her down in 1994, she did not look her age, whatever that was. If anything, the hair had grown blonder and the skin tighter. Outrageous purple outfits, topped by natty hats, reproduced something of the glow of youth.
Subservience to hard facts, such as time and decay, seldom held Mrs. Lauder back. Her own background was a study in selective self-improvement. By changing her name, acquiring that dainty little lift of an accent aigu, she suggested to customers that her background might be aristocratic and even European. French and Italian blood was hinted at, as well as a convent education. Her father, a monarchist by her telling, felt undressed in the street on Sundays without a cane and gloves.
These details were sprung on the world in 1985, in a book that accompanied the launch of a new perfume, “Beautiful”. For the promotion in Paris, Mrs. Lauder had bought up all the pinks in the city to match both the perfume boxes and the book’s cover. This sensory extravaganza was designed to eclipse an unauthorized “inside story” of her life. Under covers of cream and blue (so tastelessly passé!) her rival revealed that Mrs. Lauder’s parents, Hungarian Jews, had run a seed and hardware store in Queens, a run-down borough of New York. The young Estée had probably not finished her studies at Newtown High School. Her first jars of face cream had been cooked up not just in a kitchen over a gas stove, but also in a makeshift lab in a stable, and by an uncle whose chemical experiments stretched not only to “Viennese Cream” but to lice-killer and embalming fluid.
These revelations, about a woman who now counted among her friends Princess Diana, Nancy Reagan, the Gorbachevs and the Begum Aga Khan, were somewhat irritating. Yet it was scarcely a tale to be ashamed of. Young Josephine Esther Mentzer, as she began, was convinced from childhood that women should be beautiful. She also hoped to make a fortune by persuading them that, if they bought her creams, their beauty would last for ever. It is a story, after all, that women tend to need to believe.
With tireless energy, she devoted her life to both causes. She began in the 1930s in the beauty salons of Queens, finding an audience held captive under hairdryers and dabbing their hot cheeks with her uncle’s inventions. In 1948, Saks Fifth Avenue took a consignment; it sold out in two days. Steadily, Mrs. Lauder acquired shiny counters in more and more department stores. With the help of a friend she branched out in 1953 from creams into Youth-Dew, a bestselling bath oil and perfume combined, and became the doyenne of all beauty.
Tactility was her byword. She loved to plunge her fingers in her own gently simmering creations, palpating and inhaling them. Her creams came in heavy jars, her lipsticks in cool metal sheaths, to advertise their quality. Whenever she could she smoothed them on customers herself, achieving a “gentle glow” that was immediate and miraculous. For a time, Fifth Avenue was not safe from her. Sales staff at Estee Lauder counters were trained by her to get similarly intimate with customers. Free gifts, then an innovation, were handed out with every purchase, and free samples were sent to aristocrats in Europe. The distinctive Estee Lauder blue-green was devised to harmonize with most rich people’s bathrooms. By 2000, more than half of all cosmetics sold in America were hers.
In Insider Moves we look at the company founded by Estee Lauder and analyze the latest insider trading in the stock.

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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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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.”

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