Is Political Correctness Killing Perfume?

Can a fragrance be racist, misogynistic or ageist? An angry mob of consumers believes it can.IngeborgvanLotringeninvestigates how the perfume industry became silenced andscentsored and how its affecting the way we all smell.

- Ingeborg Van Lotringen

There’s a strange smell in the air. It’s innocent, cloying and pink, redolent of pre-teen girls. I smell it everywhere; in pubs and out at champagne receptions, in the supermarket, the office lift and in dimly lit bars made for seduction. I smell it on young, flirty women out at play but also on older, serious women mountaineering their way to the top of the career ladder. It is ubiquitous. There is no escape. Sniff the air and you, too, may catch the sweet, throat-catching scent drifting its way towards you. It is supposed to be uplifting, at least that’s what the marketing jargon would have you believe, but to me? It’s depressing. Because this, dear readers, is the smell of rot, eating away at one of the world’s great institutions: the perfume industry. SCENTS OF THE TIMES

So who exactly is hell-bent on smothering one of the most innovative, intriguing and, at times, controversial industries in the beauty world? To understand that you need to start at the beginning. Perfume has been around for as long as man has been wearing a loincloth and Cleopatra was dousing herself in rosemary-and-myrrh-infused ass’s milk. While its original use was basically to mask the rank smells of a sewer-less world, perfume later became something else: a luxury, a sensory embodiment of the wearer and, perhaps most crucially of all, a cultural gauge of its time.