Pimping Perfume

It’s Christmas time again folks, and that can only mean one thing…Yay! It’s time for those tacky perfume ads on T.V. According to the telly, perfume is the standard present of choice for Christmas. Few things make you feel as fabulous as unwrapping a jewel-like bottle of sweet, captivating fragrance. Perfume is the ultimate mood booster, an affordable luxury, and guaranteed to get you in touch with your inner sensuality. So the adverts tell us anyway.

Now I love watching Nicole Kidman sweat for her millions as much as the next girl, but does any right-minded intelligent woman actually kid herself she’ll be like our lovely Nicole, just by spraying herself with Chanel No. 5? Do men actually believe that their women will feel loved and pampered if they buy them an exquisitely designed bottle of the world’s best selling perfume? Who the hell cares what chemical gloop is inside it, as long as the advert says it’s sexy, right?

The smell is largely irrelevant to most fragrance sales, as long as it’s fairly pleasant and doesn’t make the object of your attraction blow chunks. It’s more important that the woman likes the packaging. The important thing is the pretty glass container and the clever marketing-speak that goes with the liquid, because it reflects how you see yourself. It’s the image that counts for everything. In the same way that a beautiful fashion photograph in a woman’s magazine sells fantasies to women, so too that gorgeous sexy bottle of amber coloured liquid promises that you will suddenly become irresistible to the opposite sex. If you spray yourself with this wonder-gloop, you too will be a glamorous sex goddess, you will suddenly have ravishing young men turning their heads in the street, following you round, buying you flowers. Your life will be perfect, because you too will become Nicole Kidman, because you too WILL FEEL BEAUTIFUL.



It’s not just about the glamorous advert of course. The bottles are what sell the scent, and they have to be works of art. The shape of the bottle dictates what market the perfume is aimed at, and the marketing-speak that accompanies the advert is geared accordingly. For young trendy hip-young-things, you have the “spontaneous and seductive” CK1 (simple but chic frosted bottle shape). For the up-market older woman, you have crystal glassware, such as the Versace “Bright Crystal” “for the confident glamorous woman," in a divine shade of vivid pink cut glass, with a bottle stopper that looks like a humungous diamond the size of my Aunty Aggie’s giant bunion.

Now let's consider the secondary element, the scent. Perfumes contain a variety of natural and chemical concoctions designed to react with human sweat to produce an enticing smell which emulates ovulation hormones. Because no one person’s sweat smells the same, the perfume does react differently with each person. Thus what may smell bloody horny on you, may make me smell absolutely awful. My skin is very acidic in nature, and thus most perfumes smell like cat’s pee after I’ve worn them for an hour or two. That’s why “Poison” really does smell like rat poison on me, but “hump me Big Boy” on you.

And don’t even get me started on wearing perfumes that contain real pheromones. Yes I’ve tried them, in the hope of suddenly making my dear husband find me utterly irresistible and want to bonk me all night. Unfortunately all Rich ended up with was a mammoth splitting headache that lasted for two days, and needless to say, no hanky-panky at all. The stuff which was guaranteed to make me sex-personified, actually ended up being sprayed in the loo to freshen it, whereupon visitors suddenly started to spend a heck of a lot more time in my lavatory than they ever used to. Clearly my toilet is hornier than I am.

So, ladies, do you ever fall for the ultra-subtle marketing-speak? For example, do try Sean Paul’s bogglingly-named “Unforgivable,” “created to reflect the warmth and sensuality of a woman’s body.” (In actual fact this smells like “eau-de-wet-Labrador-after-rolling-in-mud,” and the best I can say about it is that it should indeed be for the “bold, confident woman,” because you’d have to be insanely brave to try it. Still at least the name is apt.)

Who writes this crap? Dammit, I wanna go work for these marketing companies. Somebody please pay me to write this rubbish. I can’t imagine a job that would be more fun. Those perfume advertisers must think we were born yesterday. Seriously…….I mean SERIOUSLY…..would any self-respecting woman believe all that hype?

By the way Rich, as it’s Christmas, I’m rather taken with that new Christina Aguilera perfume. Sexy bottle, plus it‘s covered in “seductive” black lace, plus the pong is not unpleasant either….Obviously this will make me feel “classy, sensual and in touch with my inner woman.”. And according to the marketing hype, it will reflect the real me…“sexy, juicy and daringly different.”
Yeah right. At the cost of a month’s lattes at my local coffee shop, it may turn out to be the most expensive juicy loo-freshener ever.



In case you are actually wondering if I do wear perfume, or if instead I just embrace my inner glow and really reek like a pole-cat, my long term scent is Cerruti 1881. This is traditionally viewed as an old lady’s perfume, which goes splendidly with my glamorous “mad old cat lady” image. So what if I wear perfume for geriatrics? I rather like the smell actually. Of the perfume, I mean, not the geriatrics.

The Christmassy images are of course of Pirate Maiden.

What do you consider beautiful and why?

Melvin Moten challenged me on Friday to define my concept of beauty.

Oh dear. Time for another incredibly long blog post, then.

It really isn’t possible for me to define what beauty is for everyone, because beauty is subjective. Everyone will have a different concept of what they find beautiful, so we’ll just go for my view.

Now I read Harpers and Queen as much as the next girl. I do love my fantasies. The images of women inside are beautiful, no doubt about it, but I’m not kidding myself – they are an illusion, a mixture of good photography, MUA’s and Photoshop. Great Art though. And an enjoyable fantasy on a warm summer’s evening when I’m curled up on the sofa drinking a glass of chilled chardonnay. I don’t kid myself that I could ever look like that, and nor would I want to, truth be told. I bet those models don’t look so great when they get up in the morning after four hours sleep either. I don’t look at those images and think, wow they are beautiful, I have to look like that…in fact the images are often pretty samey after a while. So beautiful women in womens' magazines? Nope, not real beauty to me, I’m afraid.

To me, real beauty is the beauty of the soul.

AMOST ALL people, no matter who they are, have something beautiful inside them. To me, the psyche defines the person, and it is irrelevant what they look like.
I just don’t care.

I have found beauty in the most unlikely places, as well as the most conventional ones. I have several friends who have suffered tremendously with cancer, and come out of it with dignity, courage and a burning thirst for life. They may be bald from the chemo, emaciated, exhausted, tired and grumpy, but their spirits are all beautiful because they remain undefeated by their ordeal.

O.K. you say, but what about people who have done evil? There’s no beauty in them.

Many moons ago, I used to do befriending work in my spare time with prisoners – letter writing, visiting them in prison (because no-one else would) and so forth. I met quite a few unfortunates whom society locked up and threw away the key. I wrote to and visited several guys over the years. It was difficult stuff, and sometimes hard for me to cope with emotionally, but I persisted, and one or two even became (almost) friends. On the whole they were nice people, usually “normal” (whatever that is), severely mentally scarred of course, and they had done terrible things, but these guys definitely had inner beauty, the same as you and I.

One guy, who hacked his girlfriend to death with a kitchen-knife, eventually had the immense courage to face his wrong-doing. He knew he had evil inside him, he faced it, and wanted to talk about it, although it took him two years before he could trust me enough to tell me exactly what happened on that awful night when he committed the murder. Now if It had been my daughter who had been murdered, I’m damn sure I wouldn’t have found any inner beauty in him at all, but as it is, prison befrienders have to try to look beyond the evil, to try to help these people, to convince them that there is a way back from the abyss, that their soul does possess the capacity to be beautiful. And if being a prison befriender sounds like a weird thing to do, so be it. But it certainly gives you a unique insight into good and evil.

So do I see myself as beautiful? Well, of course I run myself down in the blog sometimes, much to the annoyance of many of you, but yes, I DO see myself as beautiful, and ugly too.

Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence ?
He had a concept running through many of his books called “ugly beautiful”. Basically you can’t have one without the other. Ugly and beautiful aren’t far apart at all. They are both inside us, and they are inexorably intertwined. When I look at myself, I have both beauty and ugliness inside and out. I am, after all, only human, and I am both good and evil. Not in the same balance as the guy who murdered his girlfriend, of course, but still a mixture of light and dark.

Such is the nature of the soul.

Daniel Defoe once said, “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear”

I’d like to think that good photographers help take out that diamond, admire its beauty and its flaws, and then give it a quick polish, before putting it back in the box.




The lovely Kate, from last year.