? ? 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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