Perfume adverts

Resisting description abroad

Perfume adverts. Always some impossibly ripped man riding shirtless on a black horse across a beach at night, probably holding a sword, before lifting a woman off her feet and impregnating her under the cloudless night sky. Then, in the last two seconds, a husky voice announces the name of the fragrance, inevitably some combination of the name of a Greek god and a word that sounds too erotic to be read on television. The bottle flashes on screen, and that’s it. And from that mini romance we’re supposed to infer that this is a woody, musky winter perfume with top notes of vanilla and a base of cedar and lavender.

Perfume adverts are so bizarre because they rely entirely on metaphor. You can’t write down and speak smells, so there’s really no way to communicate what the product does – what it smells like. Every other kind of advert involves some demonstration, some proof of how the product works and that it does, in fact, do a good job. The closest perfume adverts get to this is the insinuation that, if you wear this fragrance, you too will be riding a horse on the beach and night and sweep a woman off their feet. I don’t think they’re expecting you to fall for that.

Perfume adverts rest heavily on connotation. They work in cluster concepts – the kinds of things in the advert are the kinds of things that the company thinks best represents their perfume. It relies on you and the company conjuring up the same connotations from the image of a horse, or a shirtless man, or a night beach. It’s a lot more uncertain that selling a car, a phone, something that you can demonstrate the utility of much more plainly.

Travel writing is much the same. When you’ve spent a week in Paris, how do you write down the romantic buzz of the city? The vivacity of the streets? It relies on metaphor and connotation, just like the perfume adverts do.

How do you explain the analogue-ness of Castelvenere, miniature village in the south of Italy? How do you represent the deliberateness of going to the flower store, then the fruit store, then the bread store, and then the farm, for eggs? It’s just slow. Everything’s slow, and done with lots of rest in between. Stores close at one and reopen at five because everyone’s napping in the middle of the day. People walk slower, but they drive a lot faster. I think they drive faster so that when they get to where they’re going, they can walk even slower.

There’s no way to write down the smell of the bread store, either. Or the specific quality of the light at five in the afternoon when everything reopens and the village comes back to life, slow and unhurried, as if it had never been asleep. You can say warm and golden and dusty but these are just the horse on the beach. They’re the cluster concept, the connotation, the best approximation. The thing itself resists easy description.

Maybe that’s what the perfume advert understands that the rest of advertising doesn’t. Most products can be demonstrated. A phone loads fast, a car corners well, a blender blends effectively. But some things — the smell of cedar and lavender, the analogue slowness of a quaint village in southern Italy — can only be gestured at. You put a shirtless man on a horse and hope that something in the image resonates with something in the bottle. You write that everything’s slow and hope the reader has been somewhere slow. The best you can do is point and exclaim.