考研阅读精选：寻找香水中的价值
FINDING THE VALUE IN PERFUMEhttp://images.koolearn.com/casupload/upload/fckeditorUpload/2011-12-27/image/df5c17faf73949e9960344a4008b71de.jpg
Buy a bottle of perfume and you could pay as much for its advertisingas its contents. The Sceptical Shopper sniffs out some nichealternatives ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012
Wearing scent is one of life’s pleasures. Humans have been dousingthemselves in concoctions of olfactive molecules since at least theBronze Age, and any habit that persistent has to have something goingfor it. Yet it does seem odd that most of the time we mask our own,genetically unique smell with others so widely available you can catch awhiff of them in cities across the planet: Opium on the streets ofBarcelona, Eternity in Istanbul.
Heavily advertised, widely wornperfumes can smell good. But buy one and a fair proportion of your cashwill go on its marketing, not on its contents. All those portentous,mini-movie perfume ads—filled with celebrity models running (presumablyso they don’t have to spoil the effect by speaking) towards romanticassignations through increasingly rococo sets—don’t come anything closeto cheap. Not only this, but such perfumes are vital money-makers forfashion brands, so they are almost without exception made to a price.When profit is put before pong, the results tend to be one-dimensionalscents, made of cheap ingredients, that smell the same on everyone.Perhaps most irritating is that this instant recognisability is in fact abonus for the big manufacturers. It turns you into a walking advert fortheir product—and unlike those celebrity models, you’re not gettingpaid.
Unfortunately, having a bespoke perfume made just for you willcost upwards of £600 for 100ml of eau de parfum (the most concentratedform of perfume), whereas a similar volume of a globally available brandtypically costs £70. So it might be worth considering the middleground—what you might call niche perfumes, which tend to cost anythingfrom £80-£350 for 100ml. These are produced on a small scale, often byindividual “noses” rather than existing fashion labels, have anegligible or non-existent advertising spend, and you won’t smell themwafting down every high street.
What, if any, is the actualdifference? Most perfumes are a combination of top, middle and bassnotes—scented ingredients ranked according to their volatility. Citrussmells, the commonest top notes, are highly volatile and disappear fast.Resinous base-note ingredients, such as myrrh or benzoin, last for manyhours. Notes may be natural, or synthetic; the finest,hardest-to-harvest natural notes, such as aoud, or Grasse jasmine, cancost, ounce for ounce, more than gold. Don’t turn your nose up atsynthetics, however: they can mimic existing smells that can’t becaptured directly—lilac, for instance—or smell, literally, like nothingon earth.
Mass-market perfumes often nab you from the firstsniff—they put all the bang into their top notes, because they want aninstant sale. Niche perfumes are more complicated: like little storiesin a bottle, their narrative unfolds throughout the day as theparticular heat and microflora of your skin affect their layeredingredients. But you have to learn to love them. Without exception, ofall the niche perfumes I tried for this article, it was those I at firstdisliked that most grew on me. When I first dabbed on Juliette Has aGun’s Not a Perfume (£79/100ml), I was nonplussed. Six hours later Iwanted to eat myself. E. Coudray’s Nohiba (£58/100ml)? Cloying and sweetwhen first on, wonderfully sexy after a few hours. Nez à Nez’s Atelierd’Artiste, £105/100ml? Hated it on the blotter, but loved it on my skin:so complex I felt like I was watching a film. I don’t know about you,but I’d rather watch a film than be an advert.
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