In Defense of Celebrity Perfume - Vogue.com

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In the early 2000s, the celebrity fragrance business seemed to hit a fever pitch. It felt like you couldn’t walk into a department store, a big-box store, or even a drugstore without seeing a sign announcing a new launch. The trend was democratic: Actresses, musicians, models, reality television stars, upmarket, down-market—it didn’t matter who you were or where you were, there genuinely seemed to be a scent for everyone.

Now, more than a decade later, the trend—if you can even call it that—is still going strong. This summer and fall alone has seen the release of Sarah Jessica Parker’s 14th fragrance, as well as perfumes from Rihanna, Sofia Vergara, Jennifer Aniston, Katy Perry, and Paris Hilton, among others. For anyone who is counting (I am), this marks Ms. Hilton’s 20th.

I have to admit: I have been wearing Paris Hilton’s perfume—the original—since it was released in 2004. For years I had to buy it at Ulta because I couldn’t find it anywhere else; now, in 2016, I need to ask a CVS sales associate to please unlock the perfume cabinet so I can purchase a new bottle. I don’t share this often, so it’s a funny card I occasionally get to play. Responses typically focus on my choice of celebrity, but recently one coworker asked me something new: about the appeal of smelling like someone else.

The thing is, celebrity perfumes sell. Evidently, a lot of people want to smell like someone else. I was (and still am) such a Paris Hilton fanatic that I don’t remember initially registering how her perfume actually smelled because I was so excited to have and to wear something she made—or, at the very least, something she put her name on.

I’m not the only person around the Vogue office buying into a fantasy, and more than one coworker has bought into Britney Spears’s Fantasy, the name of her second fragrance, which was released in 2005. Olivia Weiss, Vogue.com’s Assistant Managing Editor, was “obsessed with the commercial. I think that’s what sold me on it to begin with, but I literally felt like a pop star when I would spritz it on . . . mortifying.”

Vogue Bookings Associate Erina Digby was a Fantasy fan, too. “I thought I was living a piece of Britney’s life,” she admits. And she’s not the only one: Vogue.com Fashion News Writer Liana Satenstein, lover of Pitbull (the musician, not the dog), had the opportunity to speak with him around the dual release of his second men’s and women’s fragrances last year. He advised her to mix both scents to create a balance. She says, “I trust him—he looks like he smells really good. I feel like a Dade County goddess when I wear them.”

Vogue.com Fashion News Writer Janelle Okwodu, on the other hand, wears Passion by Elizabeth Taylor—perhaps the original celebrity perfumer—not because of who made it but because of what it means to her. “[Passion] is still the scent of glamour and the kind of over-the-top 1980s decadence where you don’t mind your scent lingering on a good 10 minutes after you’ve left the room,” she says. “I remember it being one of the big three in my mother’s rotation back in the ’80s, and it was always the one I’d spray on myself.”

I will admit I don’t necessarily think that Paris Hilton is cool the same way I once did, and for many of my colleagues there was an air of embarrassment as they told me of their former (always former) dabblings in the world of celebrity fragrance—but why? Sure, a Rihanna fragrance release might not drum up the same sort of fanaticism as the new Fenty x Puma collab, but I don’t think that means it should be seen as lesser than. Perfume is a widely acknowledged personal choice, and for me, to this day, many scent experiments later, Paris Hilton’s perfume is the one that smells the most like, well, me.

Perhaps it’s a longevity or loyalty thing—and my medicine cabinet knows this fragrance has held on years longer than any of the Marc Jacobs Daisies or Thierry Mugler Angels that came before it—but through every identity change I’ve experienced over the past decade-plus, it has remained an olfactory home sweet home. I no longer associate the smell with its celebrity namesake, in part because I’ve lived so much of my life in it. And against all odds, it’s still being sold—so I take comfort in the fact that (hopefully, at least) I’ll always have Paris.

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