In press for her early 2000s fragrance, Glow, Jennifer Lopez describes the perfume as “something that smells like you just came out of the shower and are the sexiest person in the world.” True!— if you shower in vanilla vodka and Hawaiian Tropic sun oil. A few weeks ago, I ordered Glow from some backchannel of the internet, not so much for the scent but for the bottle—maybe you remember it: a curvy piece of frosted glass mimicking Lopez’s own silhouette. What I really wanted, though, was to see that strange “diamond” J Lo charm the bottle wears—a sort of body jewelry affixed not to a body, but an object.
When I googled the bottle based on my memory of it, I didn’t believe it ever really existed. Or at least I must have misremembered the charm. It couldn’t really have been an actual appendage to the bottle, but rather some sort of tromp l’oiel. And it is! But it’s not the jewelry that fools the eye, it’s the bottle itself. In treatise 8 of “Some Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag writes about the appeal of just such an illusion:
[Camp]is a love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things being-what-they-are-not. The best example is Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto.
So, as regards Glow, it isn’t the bottle’s bling* that is “being-what-it-is not,” but the bottle itself.
But this is beauty industry marketing 101: the shortest path to objectification is to convince the consumer to try to become an object.
Jessica DeFino has written skillfully about this in her newsletter, The Unpublishable. In a recent post, “Bite Me Hailey Bieber,” DeFino notes the relationship between food and descriptors of beauty ideals, writing,
We buy products to become products. We consume to be consumable. … ‘Glazed donut skin’ is as self-objectifying as skincare gets.
One of my favorite posts of hers is on Jessica Simpson’s early aughts line, Dessert Treats, a “kissable and taste-able” collection of body creams, fragrances, etc, that was entirely edible. (Simpson made a sort of weird attempt to cast a layer of body positivity over the products with the tagline, “Sexy girls have Dessert.”)
The gourmand fragrances of Y2K are as persistent as ever—Sweet Like Candy by Ariana Grande and 212 Sexy by Carolina Herrera (both 2015) pick right up where Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears (Fantasy) and Paris Hilton (Pink Rush, Heiress, Can Can Bling Edition!) put down their cones of cotton candy.
The marketing for these scents has changed though—while the Glow era ad copy for the the eat me scent suggested the perfume will objectify, recent iterations suggest the scent can get you eaten. Seriously. Copy for Snif’s Tart Deco describe it as, “a nod to simpler, more playful times before smartphones and skinny jeans. It's luxurious and indulgent with a youthful, rebellious side. Why be a snack when you can be dessert?”
Let me break that down: this ad copy suggests that if objectification isn’t enough, maybe being cannibalized is.
Even the bottles are much fun anymore. In place of the maximalist early 2000s plastic flowers sprouting out of Marc Jacob’s Daisy or the hot pink satin bow and gold plated “couture” dangle of Juicy Couture, these new iterations on gourmand fragrance take their packaging seriously. Despite its name, Tart Deco is a tastefully sleek taupe cylinder. It looks a whole lot like products from Juliette Has a Gun or Byredo—packaging that thinks “genderless” fragrance means minimalist, unobtrusive…tasteful.** Also, it doesn’t even smell sweet!
Which is, I guess, the really insidious part of this to me—the way the layer of humor—of “style at the expense of content,” as Sontag would say—is stripped from these new fragrances in an attempt to make them palatable. (I can’t even write “pun not intended here” because I don’t think my use of that word possesses the doubling required of a pun in this instance.) These are perfumes that suggest being in good taste means tasting good.
It's a dystopic but logical progression of Late Stage capitalism—if you’ve maxed out your potential as a producer, maybe you can become a product? It’s a critique literature, especially fiction with some feminist leaning has made with increasing frequency in the last few years. Although other attempts to dialogue with this taboo seem decidedly less critical. Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous This Smells Like My Vagina candle come to mind, as does Marina Abramović’s macron conceived to taste like the artist. Of the project, Artnet writes,
So what does Marina Abramović taste like? The sweets are a variation on Prussian Blue, a warrior color that is tied to memories of her parents and of the ocean, and they leave a guilty blue stain on your tongue. Each is stamped with Abramović‘s recently re-discovered family crest, a 17th century warrior’s emblem depicting a wolf eating a sheep, and one of the treats is wrapped in gold leaf. The flavors involved are strong and, much like the artist herself, aren’t for everybody.
This description is eerily in conversation with Hollywood’s most famous cannibal, Armie Hammer, who comes from what Vanity Fair describes as five generations of men with “a dark side” looking for, in the words of Snif, “a snack.”
Which I guess is why I prefer Glow with its top note of Stoli Vanil. It’s the fragrance of being in bad taste, of being too artificial to be of any actual value to a system that largely doesn’t seem to value me. (In fact, as I hit “publish” on this post, the Supreme Court has just ruled to reject Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan, but the relationship between camp and paying back predatory debt is for another post.)
So, my rec this week is a discontinued perfume from a celebrity who would prefer to be known for her 2022 line of body care, JLo Beauty. The price point is higher and the name is duller, but the word “glow” still dominates.
*I guess I was, indeed, fooled by the rocks that she got.
**Future post to come on genderlessness, camp, and perfume that smells like books.
oh god--I almost mentioned VS, but I want to save them for a post on how Bombshell was a better insect repellant than perfume: https://www.allure.com/story/tiktok-using-victorias-secret-perfume-to-repel-mosquitos
ooooh I'd love to learn about the relationship between camp and predatory debt ?!