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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.
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