Why We Need to Talk About Perfume Advertising this Christmas
by Dr Hannah Parkes Smith
“Oh Christ, it’s her again,” my mother mumbles as the new Chanel No.5 advert eddies back onto the screen. It’s November 2020, she’s been furloughed again, and she’s currently trying to pry the lid off a tub of grout with which to tile her downstairs bathroom.
On the TV, Marion Cotillard hangs around a bridge over the River Seine, before the moment shifts and she’s transported - along with a suited man sporting designer stubble - to the surface of the moon, where they proceed to dance across a lunar landscape looking not entirely unlike Noel Fielding’s impression of Kate Bush. The pair are almost, but never-quite, kissing as they swing their way across the stars whilst a dreamy version of Lorde’s Royals twinkles in the background.
For context, my mother has worn Chanel No.5 since the late 80s and there’s nothing that can dissuade her that it’s the scent she’ll die and be buried in. I have to marvel at her brand loyalty: she’s northern, 60 and has to do her own tiling because of the global pandemic. Meanwhile Chanel appear to be living in a world where a spritz of No.5 can quite literally take you to the stars.
Chanel aren’t the only culprits: this year’s offering by Dior for Miss Dior features a similarly jarring advert where their protagonist - played by Natalie Portman in Brigitte Bardot eyeliner - slips away from the Tuscan idyll of her wedding to escape with a helicopter-flying lover. The women in Paco Rabanne’s ‘Million’ scent adverts spin and gyrate in monochrome to a bored bass soundtrack, dripping in metallic fashion and looking like the backdrop of a mid-2000s club scene. In these landscapes everybody is glamorous, rich, slender and desirable. No matter how quirky or provocative the feel of the marketing, everybody looks the same. And that’s a problem when we consider the ongoing relationship between female body image and beauty marketing.
What’s interesting is that fragrance advertising appears so behind the times: ASOS, Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing, for all their sourcing and sustainability flaws, have been shooting plus-size models off and on for the past few years. H&M’s And Other Stories campaign featured high-visibility trans creatives in their modelling and marketing. Whistles has women well over fifty advertising their jeans and their accessories. Whilst it is relevant to note that Marion Cotillard in the 2020 Chanel skit is actually 45, quite a lot older than the industry norm, she looks much younger, with zero overt signs of ageing that would put her visibly in the category of an ‘older woman’. (Ironically, according to a survey by Which?, the consumer group most likely to spend their disposable income on high-end fragrance is women aged between 45 and 65.)
Fragrance marketed at men isn’t immune either, although the ideological implications are less damaging when we consider the ways in which masculine identities are policed as opposed to feminine ones. Men in these adverts conform to familiar archetypes of predominantly white, conventionally attractive, muscular and affluent characters; a framework that ignores the diversity of bodies in their consumer group. The association of fragrance and an outdated image of bodily perfection for both genders is aggressive, and in storytelling terms, decidedly odd - why make a move to alienate when you could offer inclusivity?
These kinds of stereotypes continue to be recycled year after year - but does this kind of advertising actually work? It’s a well-acknowledged idea in marketing that you don’t sell the product, you sell the dream: instead of making a marketing campaign centred on a woman applying your new brand of foundation, you show a woman who is ostensibly wearing your new brand of foundation and looking chic, acting spontaneously, attracting positive attention.
It’s a strategy as old as advertising itself, but it creates a homogeneity of female bodies and actions predicated on the assumption that the desired female body is the standard slender, cisgender, white and affluent one that we see almost everywhere. It creates a very narrow field in the media for what female bodies are ‘supposed’ to be and contributes to the intense social pressure for women to conform to the model. Even children are growing up to assume that deviance from that very specific image is undesirable and somehow unfeminine. Campaigns like this might work for the marketing executives, but they don’t work that well on the rest of us.
A study by the London School of Economics in 2016 reported that both men and women responded more positively to ‘approachable’ character figures in beauty and grooming product advertising as opposed to model-standard ones. If a character in a marketing campaign was ‘plain-spoken, funny, or had a regional accent’, the product marketing was more likely to receive a positive rating from their sample group than the ones that contained characters of ‘model good looks, with overt displays of wealth or acting in evocation of sexuality’. The consumer group were also more likely to say that they’d consider buying the product in the advertisement.
Sex sells, apparently, but not as much as approachability and humour when it comes to getting people to part with their hard-earned cash. So, in a year where even big business is feeling the pinch and fragrance houses everywhere are vying for every sale that they can, isn’t it time to start giving prospective customers what they actually want; making them feel comfortable and positive instead of continually reiterating what they should aspire to look like? The takeaway is, perhaps, the darkest part of the narrative here: if these businesses truly aspired to only sell themselves with no ideological agenda, it’s likely that they’d adjust their marketing strategy to include what’s actually working for 21st century men and women.
If 2020 had a signature scent it’d be the burnt-out clutch of the Conservative government hurtling down the motorway towards further lockdowns, entirely avoidable economic contraction, and a £29 million Festival of Brexit. There have been so few parties, so few long nights on the town, so few romantic meals for two… and yet this year’s crop of perfume ads have ignored that in favour of peddling out the same predictable ideals used every festive season since the Belle Époque. Be glamorous, they tell us. Allure them, entice them, arouse them. But who? It would have to be somebody in your bubble of six or the checkout cashier at your local Sainsbury’s. Where? Not sure, the pubs are closed.
This year demands a fundamental paradigm shift in how we view fragrance. Re-branding perfume as something external to ‘mainstream’ images of allure and sexuality is a move towards demanding we be kinder to ourselves and accept the diversity of bodies, narratives and sexualities that form the bedrock of modern society. And it’s especially important during a festive season that coincides with the ninth month of a global pandemic. Our bodies, which are being so stringently policed by corporate imagery trying to grind our last few quid out of us by the 24th of December, have also been suffering massive changes to their health and wellbeing thanks to the lockdown. After the year we’ve had, our bodies are so deserving of a positive change. Before anything else we need to ensure that corporate decision-makers and marketers take notice: we need to identify, critique, tweet and repeat.
For Spring/Summer 2021, give me an advertisement where a severe woman in a suit pops on a spritz of Tom Ford before taking on the boardroom. Give me an advertisement where a girl with bubblegum hair and a battered pair of Stan Smiths goes out dancing with her friends in a haze of Moschino. Give me a Chanel advertisement where there’s a narrative other than the pursuit of heterosexual sex and sexuality, where two girls make eye contact over a glass of bubbly before they run off into the night (Toyota, Nordstrom and even Coke have managed it, so why not perfume brands?). And for God’s sake, give me more non-white women, and give me more trans women.
Boots.com stocks over 900 fragrances, and yet I’ve only managed to find one fragrance represented by an openly trans person (John Paul Gaultier’s collaboration with Ines Rau in 2017). Conversely, in 2019, Gucci marketed a scent called Memoire d’Une Odeur that was described as revolutionary in terms of its “beyond gender”, “inclusive” and “unisex” scent palette - and yet it featured an advert full of white people in a conventionally gendered clothing.
Imagine, for one heady moment, perfume advertising that simply represents a diversity of bodies instead of recycling again and again the sculpted silhouette of the model du jour. Would it change the way we look at ourselves after seeing a beauty ad?
If only the people who fit into the stereotype of absolute aesthetic perfection bought perfume products, practically every fragrance company would go out of business overnight. As a society, we would benefit so much from advertising that celebrates its consumer base, instead of reminding them with a swift rap of knuckles to the head that you don’t look like this (but with a quick spray of Eau d’Ennui, you can pretend for half an hour).
The world is slowly, shudderingly waking up and moving on from the body policing, while the majority of the fragrance industry appears at the moment too set in its ways to move with the times. But in an era of global economic downturn, it’s evolve or die.
Title image by by Laura Chouette on Unsplash. Sadly this article is not sponsored by Chanel…
Dr Hannah Parkes Smith is writer and journalist based in the North.
