? ? Nice Effort

It’s easy to deride celebrity perfumes. Writing about his friendship with Robert Redford in The New Yorker, James Salter said that “when I went into restaurants with Redford, eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room; the glory seems to be yours as well.” But celebrity came with a cost; Salter remembered Redford’s saying of movies: “My presence in something is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” If people buy celebrity perfumes, it is precisely because the glory seems to be yours as well. Yet the celebrities don’t make the perfumes; professional perfumers do. Celebrity
inexorably lends an aura of artificiality, and not just to the celebrity scent; it extends to us as well. We are, at best, torn.

The fact of the matter is that some celebrity perfumes are just as good as those from fashion designers. Others are better. We often forget that a designer’s name on a scent is no more logical than that of a 20-year-old singer/actress. Before Gabrielle Chanel claimed perfume for fashion designers in 1921, it had been the exclusive territory of perfumers (see: Guerlain, Daltroff, Coty). If fragrance is now to be given to Hilary Duff (whose Wikipedia entry includes the music genre “bubblegum pop”) and her colleagues, so be it. Scents should be judged by the art form’s standard criteria: structure, quality of the raw materials, persistence on skin and diffusion, innovation, beauty.

The fact is that With Love: Hilary Duff is a perfectly good perfume. It was made by Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Stephen Nilsen, the perfumers working under the creative team at Elizabeth Arden, Duff’s licensee. If With Love is not by any means a great scent, it has an absolutely coherent structure, very good persistence on skin and a nice diffusion. With Love smells, interestingly enough, comforting. It’s not identifiably “floral,” not “perfumey” (no aldehydes) and not, honestly, particularly reminiscent of any fragrance I know. It is instead an abstract example of the contemporary naturalist school, a scent one might encounter were one lucky enough to be hugged close to the suntanned neck of a pretty volleyball player on a Malibu beach: a bit of sunscreen, a hint of the breeze from the California hills and the smell of a girl who really knows how to play at the net. Were you not to know the scent’s celebrity origins, you would be left, as she released the hug and rushed happily back into the game, with the impression of olfactory sweetness and the white of her smile. You would not be torn. You would simply smile back.

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Catch a whiff of Gucci by gucci, an unmistakably modern, youthfully alluring, and downright pretty scent where you are transported into a nightclub with music blasting out of the speakers and cocktails being served, the tiare flower evoking lithe bodies swaying to the rhythm of the song.

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? ? ? Good Juice

There is nothing technically wrong with the juice, as perfume is called by industry people, of Dreaming, the major new Tommy Hilfiger launch. And that raises a question.

This is Hilfiger’s most important new feminine since the brilliant 1996 Tommy Girl, created by perfumer Calice Becker. Tommy Girl set a new standard for American scents as it was exquisitely built and an aesthetic advance: a cool seawater green, a balance of the electrical and the natural. Since then, Estée Lauder, which is Hilfiger’s licensee, has put out assorted seasonals (perfumes sold during a single summer, for example) and flankers (riffs on existing perfumes, the scent equivalent of Spiderman 2). But Dreaming is Lauder’s first truly new creation for the Hilfiger brand in 11 years.

Dreaming was created by perfumer Stephen Nilsen. Nilsen is relatively young, with a young man’s résumé: it’s short and filled mostly with flankers, several of which were for Hilfiger. But he has already proven his talent. He has under his belt the wildly underestimated With Love Hilary Duff and the quietly excellent Moss Breches for Tom Ford’s Private Blend collection.

With Dreaming, Nilsen has created a Lauder perfume: a juice that’s been precisely and closely directed. The Dreaming creative team was led by Evelyn Lauder & Trudi Loren. Both are seasoned professionals. Together, the three have made a scent designed to please millions. The perfume opens with a lovely floral top and goes immediately into a light, sweet drydown with a gentle fruit angle. The press materials list “White Peach” and “Freesia,” though these don’t exist as natural raw materials; they are marketing terms meant to communicate a certain fruitiness and floralcy, and both come through clear as a bell. And that is basically the scent.

A reader of the perfume blog Now Smell This commented on Dreaming last December, two months before the perfume’s February 2008 launch. The comment: “I can honestly say it is delicious! My new favorite parfum!” will be representative of the general reaction. There is no reason that Dreaming should not make a lot of money with first-time buyers, and I would be surprised if it didn’t, in particular in the Asian market, for which it is perfect. It is absolutely plug-and-play accessible, it diffuses nicely, it whispers, it flatters the wearer. There is nothing wrong with it, and nothing to frighten anyone away. The question with a perfume with which there is nothing technically wrong whatsoever is whether it has the personality necessary for the sale of the second bottle.

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