By Ed Shepp
Contributing Writer
Staff Page
Few gifts say "I put no effort into this" quite like perfume. Ordinarily, you're better off giving subway passes. Or toilet-related products, because we all need toilet bowl cleaner or wipes or a new plunger eventually. They may never need perfume. And a certain type of someone—who doesn’t like perfume—will lay the “toilet water” metaphors on thick when discussing your present, especially when you’re not around. So you might as well get her actual toilet products. Because she’s kind of a b***h and why DO you hang out with her anyway? Come on, everyone is funny sometimes.
As a scent guy, I find this sad, but alas, ‘tis true. This is less the fault of perfume than of those who give it, which they do when they don’t know or want to know what would make a good present.It’s usually a bad idea to give perfume even to a scent scenester, because if you and your target don't have similar perfume personalities, you’re likely to miss the mark with your gift. Take me, for example. I love scent, but I’m not gonna go all “ZOMG this is the BESTEST gift EVER!” over a bottle of Halle from CVS just because it has a smell. If you wanna give something that smells, give a dirty sock in a jar. Gross? Of course. Useless? Not necessarily. If you received that gift, you‘d always be able to drag it out at parties when everyone is drunk and try to get people to sniff it.
But don’t get all despondent ‘n stuff. You too can give Perfume Positive©, and without spending precious minutes caring about anything. Just follow my easy-to-follow advice, which starts in the next paragraph. Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!
A good rule of thumb for giving Perfume Positive© is to reach for the extreme. Do not give a conventional cologne, and do not try to think of what the person would like. Just think of a quality and take it to beyond the beyond. The easiest way to do this is to give an extremely expensive perfume. You can get a large bottle of a Chanel boutique fragrance, like Beige, for example, for around $200. That’s pricey, but it’s a big bottle, so it’s not as per-ounce coinageous as it seems.
Of course, the example I used—Beige—gives you the opportunity to send a curious message.
“Beige, that’s what you are. Really expensive beige.”
Some would take that as a compliment. More expensive options include anything from the Tom Ford Private collection. Here his Tobacco Vanille sends a peculiar message: “For some reason I thought you should smell like pipe tobacco!” Full disclosure: I would love to smell like good pipe tobacco. Or the Frederic Malle Editions de Parfums collection. Carnal Flower is $300/oz, but it doesn’t offer a clear subtext for giving it. It just smells good.
Extremely expensive perfumes work simply because they’re expensive--maybe you didn’t put thought into the gift, but you put in cash and lots of it. It also gives the recipient something to show off and to wear on special occasions, like getting parole, even if they don’t normally wear fragrances. It is key, however, for the recipient to know that you spent a lot. Make sure the receipt somehow ends up with the gift.
If you can’t afford the extremely expensive—and who can these days, with items dropping off McD’s dollar menu with alarming alarmity—then you can go in the opposite direction: extremely cheap. This is harder to pull off. You can’t just buy anything; if you buy a crappy fake designer fragrance from the drugstore, it’s just a slap in the face. On the other hand, if you buy a cheap name brand from a drugstore, it can be a slap in the face with a velvet glove. Or even a nice present, especially since you can sometimes find once-great fragrances for now-great prices. If you’re going cheap, give one of these. You can pick up Bijan at Marshalls for a song. You can usually find gems like Tabu, Oscar, and Halston Z-14 at drugstores.
A good case can be made for giving any of these (all were once great, some still are); you could even give Stetson (Stetson Rich Suede is nice, if bland). To send a message, you could give Jean Nate or White Shoulders. But be aware that if you send that message (you’re only worth a few dollars and the wait at Eckerd to me), it could come back to bite you.
Say you give Wendy some White Shoulders because you’re not good friends. But then next year she plays a part in getting you a great job and you become almost BFFs. Then one summer day, Christmas is long forgotten, she has you over with your fiancé and wears White Shoulders, the message clearly being “YOU gave me this scent. And now you have to suffer it. And your fiancé gets to know how you douchenozzled me with this awful gift.” Don’t be mistaken and think your fiancé won’t notice. As soon as you leave, if the topic hasn’t already come up, he will turn to you and say, “God, did you smell that horrible perfume Wendy had on?? How’d she get a hold of THAT?!” Then you have to tell him, otherwise you’ll turn into a pillar of salt, which is what happens when people give bad perfume gifts and then have to confess what they’ve done.
Shame on you.
A delightful way to go extreme is to go for extremely odd. Odd scents are easy to spot, because they usually evoke a specific reaction: “Why would you want to smell like THAT?” Think of those aggressively fruity, tropical drink scents. Escada usually puts one out yearly, always some variation on tropical punch or guava or something that smells pink. They even made one called Tropical Punch once, and for what it was, it was fantastic.
Going further into the foodsphere, there’s Vanille Banane by Comptoir Sud Pacifique, which smells like banana cream pie. If you can still find it, the Burger King scent Flame would make an interesting gift. It’s supposed to have notes of “grilled meat” in it, but it just smells a bit smoky. But if you’re going to go odd, you might as well go way out and give Vulva, which is supposed to smell like a vagina. I gather it’s not intended to be used as perfume (rather, “for your smelling pleasure”), but hey, it’s still scent. I’ve not smelled it, but the site makes me queasy. I would love to get it out of pure curiosity.
One note about odd scents: You may think that Demeter scents qualify as odd, since they have names like Dirt, Laundromat, Gin & Tonic and Cannabis Flower. Once upon a time that might’ve been considered avant garde, but no longer, because 1) nearly everyone knows about Demeter by now and 2) their fragrances are rather tame; none smell intriguingly offensive and few unusual. You could, however, give Laundromat to someone as a signal to wash his clothes, or Cannabis Flower to a pothead (unfortunately, it’s not a very true recreation of its namesake) or Condensed Milk to a mother who is nursing. But I would asay that the best scents allow multiple interpretations. For example, Cannabis Flower says, “You like pot.” But Vulva suggests countless intentions: “This is so you know what pussy smells like, because you never get any.” “You’re a pussy.” “You should like pussy, you queer.” “You shouldn’t like pussy, you dyke.” Vulva is something that could keep someone up at night; Cannabis Flower is just sleepy in comparison.
Since I just mentioned Demeter scents, which I like to add things to and play around with, I’m going to bring up DIY fragrances. Yes, if you had the resources, you COULD make a fragrance for someone, but it’s a terrible idea and difficult to make work. Unless you’re a really talented or famous perfumer, the message you send with homemade perfume is thus: You [the giver] think so highly of yourself that, even though you only have experience with a few essential oils and synthetic blends, you think it giftly to present someone with a mediocre scent diluted in oil with poor diffusion and tenacity in a bottle and label that look like shit AND you expect them to like it and wear it! WTF?!?!
And don’t think you’re fooling anyone by telling them the fragrance is from your “private collection.” Bitch, please. I happen to have a private collection—so far a collection of one—but that’s exactly what it is: private. Perfume companies make private collections as a marketing gimmick; it’s another thing entirely to have one. I would never dream of giving my PC scent to someone because 1) I didn’t keep track of the formula, so I can’t re-create it; alls I got is what's in the bottle, 2) People might hate it, which automatically means they hate me and everything good in the world, and 3) When you make a scent for yourself, you put in lavish amounts of expensive ingredients, the kind of thing you wouldn’t put in perfumes to give or sell (because they would make it too expensive). And on and on and on. So if someone said he gave me some cologne from his “private collection,” I’d be all like, “This some bull-shiat!” (Unless, of course, it came from Calice Becker or Christophe Laudamiel or the ghost of Estee Lauder's perfumer or someone like that)
And now that I’ve said that you can’t give a homemade scent, I’ll give you the one way that you can. Remember it with a variation on the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads.” That is, give an animal product like real musk from a musk deer. Or civet from the actual cat. If you gave someone real civet and then wrapped it in cat carcass, you would go down in history. Unfortunately, procuring a real animal ingredient (apart from deer urine, which I suppose you could put in the “extremely odd” category, and is therefore encouraged) like musk, civet or castoreum is practically impossible. And maybe illegal too, which, while adding unspeakable allure to the gift, is probably not worth the risk of getting caught.
Hmmm, and now that I look at this paragraph, I realize that that’s not a way of giving homemade fragrance at all. Unless I guess you pull the scent pods out of the animal yourself. And seriously, that would be kinda gross.
My name is Ed Shepp, and this has been your education. You’re welcome.
Ed Shepp is a sound sculptor and perfume expert residing in NYC for ten years and moving to Sweden in 2011. He is originally from Mt Dora, Florida.
