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    Default Relative & Interesting Article

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    Recently found this article on the changes within the Perfume/Cologne industry through out the years... thought it was topical as well as interesting and some here would enjoy it.

    \"From Giorgio to Generic\" --By Teri Agins and Tara Parker-Pope Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

    Arie Kopelman, the president of Chanel Inc., often finds a way topokehis nose into the master bedroom when he visits friends. On vanity after vanity, the sight of dozens of half-used perfume bottles gathering dust confirms what he knows already from the numbers: Perfume is in badodor.\"Every woman must have 157 years\' supply of fragrance,\" Mr.Kopelmansays.Call it an olfactory shift. Women are walking down the aisle,into offices and out to dinner these days with a lot less on, in terms of scents and dollars. Mary Collins, a 31-year-old marketing manager in Atlanta, usually applies an $8 body splash from Bath & Body Works called Juniper Breeze. Nearby and neglected stands her 3.4-ounce, $35 bottle of Calvin Klein\'s CK One, made by Unilever Group. \"I don\'t like perfume enough to spend that kind of money on it anymore,\" she says. Cricket Burns, the 34-year-old style director for Avenue magazine,says she prefers fragrances from Gap Inc. stores that cost $19.50 for four ounces. And when she recently interviewed prospective nannies,she disqualified perfumed candidates because \"I didn\'t want my daughter subjected to overbearing scents. \"The perfume business first took off after World War II, whenre turning GIs brought the classic Chanel No. 5 ashore for their sweet hearts. Pricey fragrances -- 1.7 ounces of No. 5 eau de toilette go for $50 -- became fixtures on dressing tables and a female rite of passage. With double-digit gains in the 1970s and 1980s, perfume blossomed into an estimated $6 billion industry. But growth in the number of bottles sold slowed in the early 1990s, andhas actually dropped 2% to 4% annually for the past three years, according to industry consultant Mottus & Associates of New York. The year-end crunch is on now, when department stores do the bulk of their perfume sales -- and it doesn\'t look promising. At Federated Department Stores Inc.\'s flagship Bloomingdale\'s in New York City,the main aisle of the \"fragrance bar\" prominently features Moi, a $24 bottle inspired by the Muppets\' Miss Piggy, as well as $10 roll-on fragrances such as Cake Batter and Clean Wet Laundry and a $15 earthy cologne called Dirt. Elsewhere in Manhattan, Joy, the French scent made by the Parisian couture house Jean Patou and once advertised as \"the costliest perfume in the world,\" can be found in discount-store bins, marked down to $44.99 from $75. \"If someone is going to spend $100, they might prefer to buy a cashmere sweater,\" concedes Evelyn H. Lauder, senior corporate vice president of Estee Lauder Cos. who oversees fragrance development at the country\'s leading fragrance house. It\'s not as if the huge perfume business is about to evaporate. Estee Lauder reported a 21% gain in fragrance sales in its fiscal year ended June 30, and now boasts the top five fragrances in the country,including Pleasures, Happy and Tommy Girl. Moreover, industry economics are compelling enough to keep firms hunting for a winning formulation and pitch. Spend $2.40 for a dollop of essential oils and $10 or so for advertising and packaging, says Diana Temple of consultancy Temple & Associates, and you can produce a small bottle of fragrance that commands $40. The only ingredient that is missing now is demand.

    So why aren\'t women buying and wearing perfume as much as they used to? It seems to be the culmination of years of fragrant violations by perfumers themselves. Starting in the late 1970s, the culprit was obnoxious marketing. Roving women in white coats sprayed shoppers with samples. Companies loaded magazines with scent strips. Toss in the over powering concoctions of the 1980s, like Giorgio, Obsession and Poison. Then, there was a tidal wave in the 1990s of 813 new scents -- a 76% surge from the decade before -- from sources as diverse as Michael Jordan and Banana Republic. \"We\'ve created a commodity that\'s a little like canned peas,\" says Jane Terker, the former president of the beauty business of Donna Karan, which is now a unit of Estee Lauder. Makers of traditional perfume also haven\'t adjusted well to changes in grooming and life styles. Who needs a heavy fragrance that lasts for hours, notes fashion historian Caroline Rennolds, when \"people are showering after they work out, bathing as much as three times a day? \"Aromatherapy has made natural scents like patchouli and vanilla more popular. And as restaurants and offices become more casual, many people are leaving costly colognes and perfumes at home with silk ties and high heels. \"I am more likely to wear just a body wash or a deodorant,\"says Mark Adams, senior grooming editor of GQ magazine. The financial fallout is just surfacing. Renaissance Cosmetics Inc. set up in 1994 to revitalize some well-known fragrance brands, took over such faded flowers as Tabu and Chantilly. The company had a loss of $197.4 million, including restructuring and other charges, for the fiscal year that ended March 31 on sales of $179.7 million, and it recently agreed to a corporate restructuring with its bond holders. Revlon Inc. pretty much quit the fragrance business last fall, abandoning new fragrance launches and scaling back promotions. Sales of its once-high flying Charlie have fallen 2.6% so far this year,according to AC Nielsen Corp., to $19.5 million. \"Their fragrance business died a horrible death,\" says Allan Mottus, of Mottus & Associates. Unable to find or nurture a blockbuster, the industry is assaulting the market with one-whiff wonders. Of the 87 so-called prestige fragrances introduced between 1995 and 1997, only seven are still among the top 20 sellers. This year, Sanofi SA\'s Yves Saint Laurent spentonly $100,000 to launch Vice Versa, a limited-edition fragrance that it plans to yank from stores in 1999 -- roughly a year after its debut. \"There are very few fragrances that last anymore,\" says Michael Gould,Bloomingdale\'s chairman.

    The changes in the industry have diluted perfume\'s traditional cachet-- its power to define beauty, status, femininity. When perfume arrived in the U.S. in the 1940s, the hot brands were Chanel No. 5 and Joy. Women reserved it for special occasions, but there were more of those amid post war prosperity and in an era when dining, dancing and romancing still called for nice duds and a dab behind the ear. Cosmetics giant Revlon shook things up with its 1973 launch of Charlie, a mass-marketed fragrance that featured models in pant suits and symbolized a generation of liberated women. \"The brilliance of Charlie was that it realized women didn\'t want to wear sexy smells towork,\"says Mr. Mottus, the industry consultant. Seeking the next Charlie, companies unleashed a staggering 462 new fragrances in the 1980s. To stand out, perfume houses rev up their mixtures, which are complexand delicate; the formula for Estee Lauder\'s Beautiful is eight pages long. In addition to essential oils, a fragrance contains alcohol, which gives a scent its thrust. The more alcohol, the greater the olfactory hit. But in the 1980s, perfumers chose to increase the amount of essential oils to make the scents even stronger. The reformulation would ignite the first major backlash against perfume. In 1981, Fred and Gale Hayman, of their eponymous Beverly Hills boutique, brought out the $35 Giorgio. Compared with other colognes at the time, Giorgio packed in about double the essential oils --including rose, jasmine, chamomile and patchouli -- and was supposed to conjure up the lifestyles of the rich and famous in Hollywood. Its pungent, cloying aroma could hover for hours. Giorgio was among the first fragrances placed on scent strips inmagazines, exposing millions of women to the product before it hitstores. Annual sales rapidly zoomed past the $100 million mark, and Giorgio maintained blockbuster status for more than five years. The hype was enormous. In the summer of 1984, after the perfume arrived at Dayton\'s department store in Minneapolis, a skywriting plane above the city replied, \"Thank you, Giorgio.\" For its debut in Cleveland, a white stretch limousine whisked a Giorgio bottle from the airport to the Halle\'s department store downtown, where crowds waited behind velvet ropes. Potent perfumes like Giorgio and Obsession sparked a resistance movement in the early 1990s. Lavin\'s restaurant in Manhattan posted a sign banning cigars, pipe-smoking and Giorgio. An environmental-health group began handing out \"Perfume Pollutes\" buttons. Following reader complaints, the New Yorker and other magazines started yanking scent strips. Upwardly mobile women began shunning fragrances at work to distance themselves from what they regarded as the reeking secretarial pool. \"I used to remember smelling Giorgio, and there were lots of guys wearing the male equivalents of Opium in the office,\" says Martha McGuire,a managing director at First Chicago Bank.

    The office air has cleared these days, she adds. Fashion designers caught the mood and came out with their own,toned-down fragrances. Trying to shore up losses as their couture sales faltered, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Carolina Herrera were among the couture outfits that concocted hundreds of subtler scents -- so mild they usually faded after a few hours -- and launched them with understated advertising. Light perfume gave the industry a lift, but it also continued the process of weaning consumers off traditional and big-name fragrances. In 1994, Calvin Klein launched CK One, a unisex fragrance that cost $35 for a generous 3.4-ounce bottle. With its clean, citrus scent and boy-girl appeal, it surpassed all expectations, logging sales of $100 million in its first year. CK One and its ilk spawned a slew of airy, and cheaper, fragrances from the likes of the Gap and Intimate Brands Inc.\'s Bath & Body Works. Consumers also began moving off the atomizer altogether and getting their daily air-de-whatever from other scented merchandise. \"I used to buy Chanel and Joy,\" says 60-year-old Dorothy Liadak is of Baltimore, who has started snapping up drugstore bath gels scented with herbs, lavender or patchouli. \"I don\'t know if it\'s me or the fragrances that have changed. \"Demeter Fragrances Inc. caught wind of the shift down-scale and took it down-home. Founded three years ago to market alternatives to traditional fragrances, Demeter markets \"pick me up\" cologne sprays in what look like fingernail-polish bottles, sell for $15 and have names like Tomato, Graham Cracker, Vinyl and a musky miasma reminiscent of moss, leaves and compost called Dirt. Celebrities from supermodel Tyra Banks to actress Candice Bergen have ordered the new fangled fragrances.

    All this left department stores with an over supply of products,andmany routinely began sending back loads of perfume to manufacturers. They, in turn, had to try to sell the returns at a discount to distributors, ostensibly with the intention of shipping them over seas. But in a practice known as \"diversion,\" many once-prestigious products remain in the U.S., ending up in drugstores and mass retailers at a steep discount. That\'s often how Carolina Herrera fragrance makes its way to Loehmann\'s discount stores and Elizabeth Taylor\'s White Diamonds, owned by Unilever\'s Elizabeth Arden unit, finds itself in Rite Aid Corp. drugstores. Diverted upscale fragrances now account for about 15% to 20% of the fragrances sold in the mass market, a factor in Revlon\'s decision to back out of the business last year. \"The whole definition of prestige fragrance has changed,\" says Camille McDonald, president and chief executive of Parfums Givenchy Inc., a unit of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA. Where a fragrance is sold \"no longer determines what it means to be fashionable. \"Indeed, the industry, with all its changes in volume, venue and marketing, has helped make shoppers more savvy and selective. When none of the come-ons counts -- a chic name, an etched-glass bottle, a well-appointed boutique or a hefty price tag -- it\'s hard to see how traditional fragrances can recover. The final blow may be the nose factor. Having tried numerous complex bouquets, says Pamela Dalton, a research scientist specializing in smells at the University of Pennsylvania\'s Monell Institute, many people gravitate to a single favorite aroma, like vanilla or jasmine. \"And it\'s $9.99,\" she sniffs.

  2. #2
    Banned User jvkohl's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    Great article; thanks for posting it. Suggests also that pheromone enhanced fragrances are the next major trend, since just about everything else has been tried by the major players. I think we\'ll see more of the fragrance companies trying their own pheromone enhanced fragrances. Someone said Avon already has something out.

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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    <blockquote><font class=\"small\">In reply to:</font><hr>

    Great article; thanks for posting it. Suggests also that pheromone enhanced fragrances are the next major trend, since just about everything else has been tried by the major players. I think we\'ll see more of the fragrance companies trying their own pheromone enhanced fragrances. Someone said Avon already has something out.

    <hr></blockquote>If I remember correctly, Avon licensed from Erox/Pherin.

  4. #4
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    You\'re probably right, it looks as if things might be heading in that direction as to what ends I can\'t foresee. I\'m not certain, but I believe I have noticed one or two colognes specifically tailored and advertised to contain pheromones, while scent searching in the past. I suppose it really depends on consumer demand and how marketable a pheromone product by a major company or designer can become in the future.

    Glad you enjoyed the article.

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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    That\'s interesting... my sister works for Avon, I\'ll hav\'ta bring it up the next time I see her without leading her to think I already use pheromones based products.

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    PheroWizard oscar's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    Gents,

    Avon\'s \"Mood Enhancing\" line of fragrances is called \"Perceive\" in both the men\'s and women\'s lines.

    Oscar [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

  7. #7
    cuddlebear
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    I can see it now, the Avon lady rings your doorbell and delivers your mone-laced cologne and you spray some of it on you and she falls into your arms ....

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    PheroWizard oscar's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    Gents,

    I really wish I could remember where I read that Avon had licensed Erox\'s formulae. Because wherever that was, it also indicated that they also went with the accursed, convoluted, \"Wearer Effect\" like Realm.

    Anyone recall?

    Oscar [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

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    Doctor of Scentology DrSmellThis's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    Yes. Thanks for the great article.

    My hope is that perfumes will start to be made of essential oils, which is how I make them [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] . They\'re much simpler. Instead of needing 50 chemicals to get something close to jasmine, you can just use jasmine.

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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    And you\'ll be adding several other chemicals (besides the ones that cause the scent) that have medicinal properties. BTW, Doc, didn\'t you say that let\'s say Sandlewood is an aphrodisiac when used as an essential oil, but that the scent itself (sythetic sandlewood smell) has gotten nothing to do with it?

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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    Oscar -- that\'s exactly what they did. Perceive is Realm for Women lite. Supposed to lift the wearer\'s mood. Which it might if it didn\'t stink up the place so bad.

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    Doctor of Scentology DrSmellThis's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    yes and no.

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    PheroWizard oscar's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    FTR,

    Women\'s Perceive is THAT nasty, huh?
    Ever get a whiff of the men\'s version?

    Oscar [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    I guess it\'s tolerable. It smells cheap and synthetic to me, but I don\'t like Avon colognes. They put out one really good fragrance that Diane Von Furstenberg designed, and then they stopped offering it. People say I smell \"intoxicating\" when I wear it. I bought 10 bottles the last time it was offered and am almost out of my stash. The rest of their stuff smells SO cheap. I\'ll see if I can get a sample of men\'s Perceive from my Avon lady. You can order Avon online, y\'know - don\'t need an Avon lady anymore. Their colognes run about 20.00 per bottle so it\'s not a brake-the-bank investment. Their skincare products are good and they\'re cheaper than you can get like products anywhere else.

  15. #15
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    \"Perceive\" for men is on sale, 3.4 oz. cologne regularly $17.50, now $12.99; 3.4 oz. after shave regularly $15.50, now 10.99 -- there\'s a \"Deodorant Body Talc\" and a roll-in deodorant in \"Perceive,\" too, all on sale in Avon\'s Campaign 22 book. \"Energizing and masculine. Citrus notes of mandarin and grapefruit, grounded with earthy sage, sensual patchouli and calming cedarwood.\"
    FYI if anyone wanted to try it as an alternative to Realm.

  16. #16
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    FTR - I think that most of the Avon line smells cheap. They may have one out of 20 that\'s OK but for the most part, it\'s the Old Spice line to me - nothing real fresh and alluring. I\'ve got to stay with Passion &amp; Pleasure if I\'m really going to play the game with Cool Water &amp; Agua in the bullpen.

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    Phero Pharaoh BassMan's Avatar
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    I have the Perceive roll-on deodorant that I bought for a buck at a close-out in the mall. Smells like any other deodorant, never noticed a hit. Could be a rip-off at that price, tho.

  18. #18
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    Default Re: Relative & Interesting Article

    ... I agree, just said that a couple of posts up. But I mention it in case it might be of interest. Perceive\'s pheromone technology is licensed from Erox and has the same backwards pheromone philosophy.

    http://biz.yahoo.com/e/l/e/erox.ob.html

    http://www.avoncompany.com/investor/annualreport/pdf/avp99ar2.pdf


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