Lifestyle Choices

By the seventies, fragrances had invaded every area of our lives, from the smell on the paper tissue or kitchen towel to the myriad of perfumes we can choose from for bath products, shampoos, colognes, laundry detergents, and fine scents at almost any price. Now we are also witnessing the development of new psycho-scents–essential oils used for their effect on mind and body, and carefully chosen incense that smells the way it does to clear the mind for meditation or to soften the edges of reality more gently than the mind-bending drugs of the sixties did. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in a world of scent that affects us on almost every level of response.

Fine perfumes used to be the province of the French. If someone wanted a good perfume, he went to France to have it made. It had to have a French name and French quality, and the advertising used to promote it showed a particularly French flavor. Then the Americans got in on the act. They began to use advancing technology to produce good new scents (sometimes at remarkably low prices) that hit you between the eyes. What they lacked in subtlety they made up for in overt sexiness and power.

Following Estée Lauder’s lead with the successful Youth Dew which appeared way back in 1952, a great gamut of strong, unmistakable “American” fragrances appeared, from the phenomenally successful Charlie to Lauder’s Private Collection. These newer scents had some important things in common: They were stronger and more tenacious than any before; they were usually associated with a particular image or lifestyle (remember Babe, Blase, Smitty, Jontue, and so on); and many of them were “super perfumes”-made so by increasing the levels of aromatics and by adding an emollient to the alcohol. This helped control the evaporation rate of the perfume on the skin. It also gave the perfume an oily, velvety texture when it was spread on the skin. Thanks to clever advertising, this new silky feeling of perfume became associated in the consumer’s mind with tenacity and quality—so much so that many women now believe, quite wrongly, that if a perfume doesn’t have this velvety feel it is not really good quality and won’t last.

But the trend was set and it has remained. Even the finest French scents that have appeared in the past few years bow to American technology and style.

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