Your celebrities are coming to you…in bottles
Clementine, rose absolute, Namibian myrrh, golden amber – these are the scents that will infuse Beyonce's first fragrance in ten years, a $160 eau de parfum produced in France and set to launch this November. She isn’t the only A-lister who has released a scent as of late –Troye Sivan’s Tsu Lange Yor line, meaning To Long Years in Yiddish, launched in August and features a limited-edition $1178 dreidel. Pleasing, Harry Styles’ beauty brand, announced a plan to develop three fine fragrances. The celebrity fragrance is back, and it’s more sophisticated and lavish than ever.
It would be a mistake to say the concept of celebrity scents is a recent development. Back in 2002, the buzz started with Jennifer Lopez’s Glow--a clean, youthful fragrance with notes of orange blossom and musk that captured the sweet tail of freshly washed skin. It set off “the scentocalypse”, as Jezebel Magazine coined it, with Taylor Swift, David Beckham, Paris Hilton, and Madonna among the countless celebrities who slammed the market with scents of their own. But there was a certain je ne sais quoi lacking to this celebrity fragrance wave, a twang to finding their bottles on the shelves of Walmart and common retailers that toppled its success, with the title as the reigning monarch of fragrances still held by designer brands from the likes of Gucci and Dior. Sales in celebrity fragrances fell nearly a fifth from 2015 to 2016 alone.
So why are they coming back now? There’s a heftier price tag, yes, but also more comprehensive branding and luxury appeal. Celebrities are remolding the cheap reputation of their products established in the early 2000s, and with the blossoming fragrance industry, plenty of opportunities abound. Historically, moreover, fragrances have large profit margins. Actual perfume oil occupies no more than a few pounds in a bottle, and even after its packing, a perfume’s markup is usually much higher than its production costs.
There has also been the incentive of throwback culture. You know the vibe–Y2K glitz, low-waisted jeans, and velour tracksuits have been embellishing the feeds of Instagram and TikTok and emerging upon the catwalk once more. Beauty and fashion are moving hand in hand back through a cyclical rhythm that merges the past with the future. It may seem paradoxical in nature–for a society so hell-bent on moving forward and paving the way with complex AI technologies and innovative solutions to everyday problems, we are perplexedly obsessed with the past.
And for a consumer, the draw of these tiny bottles lies in their psychological power. You can smell perfume, but never see it. Most people have never met their favorite celebrities, much less gotten to know them on a personal scale–but their perfumes can give you a hint of their presence, emotions, and way of moving through the world. They are more affordable entry points compared to designer clothes, or even tickets (cue the wails of those who missed out on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour). You may not be close to your celebrities, but perfume gives you another alternative, a sort of parasocial interaction where you understand the celebrity in a different way than engaging with their social media or other content.
However, whether this transformative world will be accessible to consumers today is a question worth considering. Amidst a struggling economy and several tumbling shares of luxury brands, there has been plenty of speculation that the luxury industry is bracing for a slowdown. Whether or not this will happen, it is undeniable that the higher-price pivot that the perfume industry is making will not be loved by all. As luxury brands navigate economic tides, will this olfactory trend withstand the test of time?
