Celebrity perfume. A face on a bottle.

Elizabeth Taylor and an idea

In January 1960 the photojournalist Art Shay photographed Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher in Chicago at a promotional event for Smell-O-Vision, a system for bringing scent into the cinema. The print is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Shay later said the couple politely made a show of enjoying it. The technology did not last. The picture of a star smelling did.

Three decades later Taylor put her own name on a perfume. White Diamonds appeared in 1991 with Elizabeth Arden. The name did not speak of flowers or wood. It spoke of diamonds, which the public had tied to her through years of press.

What stands out is the fit between person and object. Taylor was not selling an abstract smell. She was selling part of an image already in the buyer's mind: glamour, endurance, a life photographed without pause. The bottle became a small piece of that image that anyone could take home.

Glow and a wave

In 2002 Jennifer Lopez launched Glow with Coty. This time the name on the bottle was the familiar nickname the public used for her, and the image around it was that of a pop star at her height. After Glow, a singer, actor or athlete having a perfume of their own gradually became ordinary. Every year brought more names.

To be fair, many of these bottles are made seriously. Behind them are professional perfumers and large houses with full laboratories. Some celebrities are closely involved in choosing the scent. Others only lend a name. Buyers usually cannot tell which is which.

The wave also opened a door for many first time buyers. A young fan of a singer may walk up to a perfume counter because of a familiar name, and start paying attention to smell from there. Not every road to the nose has to pass through books.

The seller is a face

For most perfumes, the invitation to buy passes through a story about materials, a perfumer, a place. For celebrity perfume, it passes through a face. The advertising does not need to explain the scent. It only needs to show the person.

This exposes a general truth of the trade: smell is very hard to sell on its own. It does not appear on a screen or in a photograph. The image steps in as its representative. Celebrity perfume simply does this more openly.

For the same reason, these bottles are often tied to a moment. When the person's image changes, the scent takes on another meaning. Some bottles are kept as souvenirs of a period. Some quietly leave the shelf.

The trace of an image

Penta understands scent as the trace of something that happened. Usually that something is an object: a leaf through fire, wood through time. Celebrity perfume shows another possibility. What happened may be an image, a face pressed into the memory of many people at once.

Smelling such a bottle years later, we do not remember materials. We remember a poster, a song, a summer at fifteen. The scent carries the image, and the image carries a stretch of the smeller's own life.

Perhaps this is what Art Shay caught in 1960 without meaning to: a star leaning in to smell, and viewers of the photograph looking at the star, not thinking of the scent. The image comes first. The smell follows, and sometimes stays longer.