Buy by the box

What are we buying when we buy perfume? An image, a vision of what it will do for us. A box, the attractive packaging that surrounds it. A scent, the fragrance itself. What are our priorities?

There was a time, when markets were smaller and a company's own name meant something, that one bottle design might be used for one scent after another. The bottle, by its shape and design, helped identify the source -- the company behind the fragrance -- and brought credibility to the fragrance itself.

I was reading a designer interview in a fashion magazine the other day. I won't mention the designer's name as a friend works for that person. But the designer, late in the game, had launched a fragrance for the house and spoke of it with great pride. Its creation was, of course, shepherded by the designer.

But also of course the fragrance itself was created for the designer by a well known (in the fragrance industry) perfumer working for one of the top five international fragrance giants. This is how designers get "their" fragrances. While they can create the graphics for the box and suggest the graphics for the bottle (although this is usually done by bottle designers), there is nothing they can do to "design" the fragrance except attempt to describe, in words, what they think they want and then to say "yes," "no," or "maybe" to the samples that are presented to them and perhaps, in words again, suggest modifications. "Designing" a fragrance is a matter of aroma chemistry, of mixing molecules, of sniffing and balancing one chemical ingredient against another. It is not a graphic or visual process.


Now look at the buying decision again. Clearly the first step is to be attracted by the star power of the designer. If you've never heard the name, the fragrance becomes just one more out of dozens of new fragrances competing with a hundred plus older fragrances. So being attracted by the name is point number one.

Next, before sampling the fragrance, you see the box. The more interesting the packaging, the more favorably disposed you are toward this new fragrance before you've had a chance to smell it.

Now smelling the fragrance would be the logical next step, IF you are already attracted by the designer's name and the fragrance's packaging. And at this point we hit a stumbling point. Is a sampler bottle available? If it is, is it clearly marked so that you can be sure that what you are spraying is in fact your designer's perfume? I've noticed at perfume counters that bottles are often unmarked and not at all in the shapes of the standard bottles for the fragrances they represent -- probably to prevent theft.

Finally we look to see if there is a test blotter we can spray in case both our wrists have already been sprayed with a competitors' offerings. Here, quite frequently, if we do find a test blotter, it will be labeled for a competitor's perfume.

Now that we have gotten all this out of the way we try the scent -- the perfume itself. But can the scent -- will the scent -- drive us to open our wallets and withdraw the all important credit card and make the purchase ... while the sales person, if she hasn't yet rushed off already, is still be trying to sway us toward another perfume that she has been encouraged to promote.

Do you see by now that it's not the scent that is making the sale? The scent merely tips us to pay or not to pay but the tipping point has been reached by other means.

Every so often a perfume does hit the market that is so compelling that we have to sample it and are likely to buy, by the reputation of the fragrance itself. It happens perhaps once in five years. Or maybe once in twenty.