Perfume ads are not like other ads. It is uniquely difficult to advertise an olfactory product via a visual medium, and this leads to some unusual outcomes.
A game that my loved ones and I like to play in the cinema is called: ‘Booze, car or perfume?’ When a particularly abstract pre-movie advert begins, you have to guess which of the three it is. A pretty reliable heuristic I have found is that the more baffling, alienating and nonsensical the advert is, the more likely it is to be a perfume ad.
Sometimes a fragrance ad really hits – the classic Old Spice ad, for instance, made it into our rundown of the best ads of all time. More often, however, fragrance and perfume ads take some absolutely wild swings and conjure up absurd narratives, as some of the advertising industry’s finest minds continue to grapple with the challenge of how you sell a product without being able to convey that product’s defining feature.
Let’s take a trip through a selection of my favourites, the wildest of the wild – the hits and the misses. And if you want to see some examples of advertising done right, check out our index of the best adverts by decade.
01. FOR A MAN
This one is a classic. I include it first to firmly impress the point that we are not necessarily using the term ‘wild’ as a pejorative here. To put it more plainly: this advert whips. It absolutely rocks.
Directed by Jean-Paul Goude, it’s for the fragrance Chanel Égoïste, and over the course of just thirty seconds it manages to make you feel like you’ve been punched in the temple and left for dead by the roadside.
‘Égoïste, where are you?’ a woman whispers, and then we are well and truly off to the races. A parade of French women on balconies shout and scream, overlapping each other.
Half of the words are unintelligible, and when you can understand them, they’re things like ‘I want to die’, which do not elucidate matters. The close-ups are too close. Every single shot is a dutch angle. ‘Oh shame,’ a dozen women shout, ‘oh sweet revenge, where are you?’
Then the Égoïste bottle enters the frame and it feels like being offered a cigarette after a four-hour police interrogation. The camera turns right-side up; colour bleeds into the frame. Everything makes sense again. ‘Thank you, Égoïste,’ you say, happy that you’re no longer being battered into submission.
The women keep chanting: Égoïste. Égoïste. Égoïste. A male voice intrudes to clarify that Égoïste is ‘FOR A MAN’. As this continues, the last lingering threads of your resistance crumble. Égoïste. FOR A MAN. These are the only words that make sense to you anymore.
Good ad. The transition from the full-size building to the scale model at the end is marvellous stuff. I don’t know if Luca Guadagnino saw the Égoïste ad and ripped it off for that bit at the end of Queer where Daniel Craig looks into the tiny building, so I’m forced to assume that he did. What a hack.
02. Natalie Portman killed in helicopter crash
For two thirds of the runtime, this one seems pretty normal. Natalie Portman has enjoyed a long and no doubt fruitful partnership with Dior, so seeing her in a fragrance ad hardly feels out of pocket.
We meet her in a hotel suite, in sultry black and white. A concierge arrives: ‘Your flowers, madame.’ Natalie clarifies: ‘It’s “miss”, actually.’ She dresses, clearly ill at ease, then meets a bald man playing her father and is unhappily walked down the aisle. All makes sense so far.
In profile, the bald father looks a lot like Patrick Stewart, so you’ll probably miss whatever happens at the altar because you’ll be thinking things like, ‘Is that Patrick Stewart? No, no, it’s not. Really does look like him from the side though. Same nose. I wonder if The Next Generation is still on Netflix, I could definitely give that a rewatch. Maybe start from when the Borg show up.’
At this point, the image switches to colour, causing you to pay attention again. Natalie has jilted her fiancé, kicked off her shoes and hauled ass out of there. She runs through fields, sloughs off her wedding dress to reveal a black slip, and reaches the sea. Still pretty normal. Then the helicopter arrives.
The helicopter is where things go off the rails. Its mysterious pilot lowers a rope ladder for Natalie to climb, but he clearly doesn’t want to make things easy, because he also starts absolutely hosing her with rose petals.
There’s a Takeshi’s Castle quality to the scene as Natalie perseveres while the unseen pilot is quite clearly trying to hose her into the sea with petals.
She triumphs and steps into the cockpit, revealing her pilot, saviour and tormenter to be none other than… beloved Japanese character actor and gameshow host, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano.
Not really. It’s just some guy. But anyway, Natalie puts on a headset and they fly off into the sunset, whereupon the guy immediately starts sensually kissing her neck, and I’m sorry but that is where it loses me.
Piloting a helicopter is an extremely risky activity – they are one of the most dangerous modes of travel in existence. You should not be distracted while piloting a helicopter! You should, at the very least, be looking where you’re going!
Right before the end, there’s a fleeting shot of the very top of Eiffel Tower, which doesn’t seem to bear immediate relevance to anything, since Natalie and her beau are flying away over the ocean.
I am therefore forced to conclude that this is actually a macabre, David Fincher-esque piece of subliminal foreshadowing, and the top of the Eiffel Tower is what Natalie and her nameless man are shortly going to crash into while not paying attention. Hundreds of people will be killed and a national monument destroyed in one of the greatest aeronautical disasters of the decade. I take no pleasure in reporting this.
03. Boys will be horse
Fellas, don’t you sometimes want to just run on the beach? Don’t you just want to sprint shirtlessly down to the water’s edge? I mean, god forbid men have hobbies. Is it a crime now for a man to run on the beach at sunset, and for a horse to also be there? Is it toxic masculinity to swim with a horse? Is it lowkey reddit-coded to caress a horse’s flank in the water? Bros, are we being problematic if our swimming form begins to meld with that of a horse? Fellas – is it gay to be a centaur?
Starring Adam Driver and directed by Jonathan Glazer (yes, Under the Skin, The Zone of Interest, that Jonathan Glazer), this Burberry Hero ad poses many questions about what it is to be a man, what it is to be a horse, and what it is to be a man-horse. We all know that boys will be boys – but sometimes, it’s good to remind ourselves that boys can also be horse.
04. Bottle too big
Okay, I can admit that by the standards we’ve established so far, this one is not that strange. At first glance, you might not see anything amiss. Marc Jacobs is hawking his Daisy fragrance with some loose, vibey shots of young women in a field. There’s a crackly vintage grain to the images, it all feels like summer distilled, and is honestly pretty effective.
But why bottle so big?
I mean, you see it, right? I’m not losing my mind? Bottle too big. Perfume bottle normally small, but this bottle big. When a woman lies prostrate over the back of a horse – that’s fine. That’s normal. I can cope with that. But then I notice she’s holding a bottle of perfume, and the bottle is… big.
‘Bottle too big,’ I mutter to myself as I drag the circle back to watch it again. A woman lies motionless in a field of daisies, eyes closed. She’s not visibly breathing. Is she dead? Did she die because bottle too big?
When the final image appears, it is mocking me, because now there are two bottles and both of them are big. The voiceover appears and it simply says ‘Daisy. Marc Jacobs.’ As though daring me to point anything out.
Imagine if you went to meet a friend for brunch, and when they turned up, they were dressed as Willy Wonka. But then imagine they refused to acknowledge it and just kept on talking to you and eating hash browns like everything was normal. That is how I feel when this voiceover person refuses to acknowledge that the bottles are big. If this ad had ended with her saying, ‘Daisy. Marc Jacobs. Yes, we know the bottles are big, sorry, we’re working on it,’ then everything would have been fine, and I wouldn’t have needed to include this one.
05. Wet leg
There is a fair amount to like about this 1977 Rive Gauche ad, not least the disco banger that underscores the adventures of our independent woman protagonist. ‘The girl who’s so contemporary, she’s having too much fun to marry,’ the chorus sings, and you can believe it. She is driving, she is changing gears – she’s having an absolute ball. There’s so much going on here that a 29-second song manages to fit in a key change.
However, there’s a particular detail that I just can’t get past. Watch the video, and pay attention to what happens at the six-second mark.
I mean… she just absolutely drowns her leg in the perfume there, doesn’t she? Do people normally spray perfume on their legs? I don’t. I normally think of perfume as something lightly dabbed on the wrists and neck, but there’s this woman-about-town absolutely housing her legs with the stuff. You’d think she’d get through a bottle a day. In fact, she must, because at the fourteen-second mark she does it again, but on her chest and neck this time!
No, independent woman! You don’t need any more! Your legs already smell like a chemical weapons plant, you don’t need more Rive Gauche! But alas, she is simply too contemporary to listen.
06. The Gravité Prison Experiment
‘Your presence is craved,’ claims this ad for Gravité Cologne by Particle, and they’re going to prove it with science. They’re going to blindfold a group of models, who can all deliver a line at maybe 7/10 on the convincingness scale, and then they’re going to introduce to the room a man who has doused himself in Gravité.
The models sniff him as he prowls around. They like what they sniff. They’re intrigued. They remove their blindfolds, only to discover that the man is none other than… Japanese character actor and gameshow host ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano.
Not really. It’s just some guy – and what’s more, he’s left the room. The models are confused; why did he leave the room? Seems weird to just walk in somewhere, let people sniff you, then leave. I think it would have been more polite for him to stay. Perhaps he simply did not understand the gravité of his situation.
07. Check out my new nepo, nepo of choice
Finally, no roundup of perfume ads is complete without this stone-cold classic for Kenzo World. Directed by Spike Jonze, the ad stars a pre-megastardom Margaret Qualley as a woman who excuses herself from a dull gala dinner, and once she’s alone in the lobby, throws herself into a spectacular dance sequence. She crawls spider-like over a wall of mirrors; she licks the nose of a bronze bust.
Qualley absolutely shreds the choreo, bringing all of her nepo-baby charisma (look, it doesn’t lessen her talent to point it out) and making full use of her incredibly expressive face.
Things begin to escalate. She elbows a guy in the neck. She starts shooting lasers from her fingers. She bursts through an eye made of flowers. She beats her chest, breathes hard, and then we are reminded that we should probably buy some Kenzo World Perfume.
It is quite clearly a spiritual sequel to Jonze’s famous video for Fatboy Slim’s 2000 hit Weapon of Choice, starring Christopher Walken – right down to the wall of mirrors and the bit at the end where she flies.
Is it good? Undoubtedly. Does it make you want to buy perfume? I don’t know. I don’t think I know what advertising is any more. The only things I know to be true are: Égoïste, bottle too big, and sometimes a man is a horse.
For more straight-laced branding fun, see our most iconic logos post.
