Do You Have Taste?
The Don't Buy List: Issue #74
Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST.
Let’s start with a quiz. Which of the below perfume descriptions are from actual perfume retailers describing actual perfumes, and which are nonsense descriptions I just made up? (Answers below!)
DESCRIPTION 1:
“Picture a Barbie melting in a hot car: vanilla, candy floss, white summer florals, hedione, cashmeran, ambroxan, musk, strawberry, ginger. The artificial epitome of sex.”
DESCRIPTION 2:
“I imagined not sun and palm trees but cool surfers in day-glo swimsuits spending evenings in the ocean, moonlight glowing on the water. Crashing waves and untamed youth.”
DESCRIPTION 3:
“I imagined wearing tall heels on hot pavement, the delicious pain of walking to meet a date for a dirty martini over a shared cigarette. Smoke, olives, baked bread. Squeezed lemon and untamed curls.”
DESCRIPTION 4:
“It evokes polyester, ripped denim, exposed skin, and Veuve Clicquot spilled on a shag carpet. Quelqu’un M’a Dit, bitten lips, delirium.”
DESCRIPTION 5:
“Waking up screaming, Dissonant score, Le Sacre du Printemps, Virginia Slim, Hysteria.”
DESCRIPTION 6:
“A scratched CD in an overheating Sony Walkman. Headphones tight on your ears as your favorite line skips and repeats. Vanilla, cinnamon, musk, pheromones, sweat, patchouli, thighs sticking to the vinyl seats of a vintage car.”
This is all in good fun :) I really do adore bizarre perfume copy — I bought one of the scents described above myself. (Although I didn’t end up liking it and do not wear it, so…?)
ANSWERS: 1, 2, and 5 are REAL. 3, 4, and 6 are FAKE.
RELATED: Pharrell’s first fragrance for Louis Vuitton “smells like sunlight.”
ALSO: Paris Hilton is launching Iconic, her 30th fragrance, per AirMail. The article suggests Hilton has been “underestimated” as a force in the cosmetics space for her entire career. But, Linda Wells writes, “A seasoned executive in the beauty industry tells me that the Paris Hilton fragrances — Love Rush, Gold Rush, Rosé Rush, Luxe Rush, all the Rushes — in bottles shaped like a headless body in an evening gown, may just be the top-selling brand globally.” Who is doing the underestimating here, exactly? Not consumers, who are buying gallons of the stuff. Not the fragrance corporation that’s backed Hilton’s 30 perfumes. I just feel like we have some strange ideas about what constitutes under-appreciation and underestimation in this country… (The article also includes the upsetting news that Hilton will soon launch a skincare line to “address tech neck and puffy eyes, among other things. “Whatever’s new and in the future and people don’t have yet,” says Hilton. I have to give it to her: Whatever people don’t have is a refreshingly honest brand mission statement.)
GUEST EDIT: I guest-edited this month’s issue of
! I wrote a bit about one of my go-to beauty podcasts — Naked Beauty by Brooke DeVard — and something I noticed about the guests: They’re all beauty industry professionals, but when asked what makes them feel most beautiful, almost none of their answers involve the exports of the beauty industry. From my guest post:I asked DeVard about this somewhere around episode 125. “It’s extremely rare for women to say they feel their most beautiful after a blowout or with a full face of makeup,” she told me, estimating that fewer than 10 guests had ever referenced beauty products in this particular segment.
Respectfully: What are all these beauty industry people going on about, then? If we feel most beautiful without beauty products, what is all this stuff we’re buying?
TASTE: Also included in my passerby edit was this definition of taste from Simon May’s Love: A New Understanding Of An Ancient Emotion: “Taste — that total sensibility of our being, that ordering of the soul, which governs all our decisive choices and responses — is the background of any action and thought that is genuinely ours. From taste flow those ultimate ends and values that speak most distinctively of us — of how, like everything we feel, fear, desire, do, and value, we have been forged by our heritage, our character, our choices, our life circumstances, and a myriad of external influences. From it flows what we affirm, reject, fasten onto, and fail to fasten onto, in all we encounter, which is perhaps related to what Thomas Mann means when he speaks of ‘style’ as the ‘mysterious assimilation of the personal to the objective.’” This deserves to be read, reread, printed, framed, and consulted every time you consider buying something new in the name of style!!
HOT POCKETS: The hot new thing in beauty is… pockets? Hailey Bieber’s brand Rhode launched “Pocket Blush,” an “on-the-go” cream blush small enough to stash in your pocket. And (scoop!) there’s another pocket-themed beauty release coming soon — a skincare brand and a clothing company are collaborating on a shirt that features an embroidered pocket in which to store the skincare product. I think this is part of a larger shift in the beauty space: a focus on the product itself rather than (or in addition to) what the product does. It’s a new kind of “wearability,” the merch-ification of beauty, the physical product as status symbol vs. the appearance it gives you as status symbol (think: acne stickers, everyone wearing those under-eye patches on-camera). Very much catering to the “sale gaze.”
SICK BURN: Alexander Wang’s latest runway show featured models sprawled out in tanning beds.
SICK BURN 2: Because no beauty trend can stop at a relatively normal spot, the look this summer goes beyond the faux-tan — it’s the faux-sunburn. “While actually sunburning your face is very much out, it’s hard to beat the warm, glowy look of too much sun across your cheeks in the summer,” Winky Lux wrote in a marketing email. “Enter: sunburn blush.” Allure also recently published a tutorial for “10-Minute ‘Sunburned’ Makeup.” This is a big part of the blush boom. (The other part — which I think is clear in Rhode’s promo video for Pocket Blush — is a continuation of doll-inspired aesthetics.)
SICK BURN 3: In an Instagram video for Allure, a cosmetic chemist explains (positively) that plumping lip gloss is supposed to trigger a “burning sensation” and “inflammatory response” — and that’s how you know it’s working.
“The initial burning sensation starts to kick in after 3 - 5 seconds,” they say. “The inflammatory response is a little more pronounced and thus the lips actually look plumped. This is what a traditional lip plumping gloss is supposed to do.” And this is what I’m talking about when I talk about the difference between the science of aesthetic manipulation vs. the science of care and functioning. (Also: I guarantee that everyone voluntarily inflaming their lips is otherwise concerned about “inflammaging.”)
WOMAN LOOKS YOUNG: Very jarring to see a post about Vera Wang “aging backwards” on a “good news” Instagram account. “Famous woman doesn’t appear to be old” does not belong next to news items about helicopter rescues, disability rights, and charitable donations.
COOKED: Rest Religion is promoting its moisturizer as “Chicken Soup For The Skin.”
And I just have to say… Chicken soup is already chicken soup for the skin. Whatever health benefits you believe chicken soup has for the body, it has those health benefits for the skin. Because the skin is part of the body. It gets the nutrients it needs for basic functioning from the same place as the rest of your bodily organs. (Food.)
MORE RECOMMENDED READING:
“TikTok Shop Has Become a Huge Online Beauty Retailer as the Category Has Grown” by Kathryn Lundstrom & Paul Hiebert for AdWeek
“Is there asbestos in your makeup? Why women with cancer are suing big beauty brands” by Anne Karpf for The Guardian
“World’s First AI Beauty Pageant Names 10 Finalists” by Leslie Katz
for Forbes
“Who’s Afraid of Investing in Black-owned Beauty Brands? How the Beauty Industry Is Failing Black Entrepreneurs” by James Manso for WWD
“How Difficult Is It To Create Foundation Shades For Darker Skin Tones?” by
for Face Value
FINALLY: This Il Makiage ad is a horror story in two frames.
You’re Gonna Die Someday No Matter How Young You Look,
Jessica
God I love unhinged perfume copy. There's a Byredo one about "the clacking oars of the Phoenicians" that I still think about all the time.
okay, 1) I am a copywriter and there is NOTHING more fun to write than really-fucking-out-there fragrance copy. I absolutely loved all of these! Even the melting Barbie doll (reminded me of the Black Hole Sun video) I write for a candle company and I almost always look at perfume copy for inspiration. and 2) "Chicken soup is already chicken soup for the skin" <laughing/crying emoji>