Are celebrity fragrances making a comeback?

Lava Lamps, Impulse body spray, clear mascara, hot pink Motorola flip phones… and, of course, the latest Britney Spears perfume. These were all mainstays of noughties culture. Back then celebrity fragrances reigned supreme: sales were sky high, and new versions were constantly being churned out. But, there came a point when the slew of these scents became excessive and the market crashed. Sales have been declining year-on-year ever since: they fell by nearly a fifth from 2015 to 2016 alone, according to the NPD group – a considerable plummet, especially given that the overall fragrance market grows steadily each year.

Could the tide be turning for these scents, though? Beauty trends tend to go hand-in-hand with fashion ones, and these past few seasons we have seen a revival of nineties nostalgia with low-slung jeans, slip dresses and platform sandals on the catwalk. In make-up this has been seen with a return to wet-look gloss, skinny brows and French manicures. So, it stands to reason that a boom in nostalgic celebrity fragrances might also be on the horizon.

Media attention too has led to renewed interest in the market, and even prompted spikes recent sales. Lauren Oddy, the brand partnerships manager at Fragrance Direct, explains, “Media coverage can often have a big impact on celebrity fragrance sales. When the Britney Spears documentary was released earlier this year, we saw a staggering increase in sales around her fragrances.” Fragrance Direct also reports a 310 per cent increase in sales of Spears’ perfumes since her engagement announcement was published on Instagram on the 12 September. The pop star is one of the celebrities consistently at the forefront of the market, with 33 fragrances to her name. The first, Curious, in its princess-like blue glass bottle, launched in 2004 with Elizabeth Arden, and her latest scents, Electric Fantasy and Fantasy Sheer, launched just this month.

Another celebrity who has featured heavily in the press recently – with vast media attention around her rekindled relationship with Ben Affleck – is Jennifer Lopez. Kim Eyton, the global brand manager for Jennifer Lopez Fragrances, has seen “a very positive growth in sales post-pandemic as customers get back into stores”. She adds: “Plus, Jennifer is having a real ‘moment’ right now. Her latest launch, One by Jennifer Lopez, has just launched in stores and is already a bestseller.” In fact, J Lo is credited with ushering in the whole new wave of noughties celebrity scents. Her fragrance Glow, which launched in 2002 with its heady mix of neroli and grapefruit, “changed everything,” according to The New York Times’ former scent critic Chandler Burr. It began what Jezebel titled “the scentocalpyse”; every celebrity under the sun coming out with a fragrance. Taylor Swift, Jennifer Aniston, Christina Aguilera, David Beckham, Beyoncé, Naomi Campbell, Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, Madonna – the list is endless.

Celebrity fragrances, and endorsements, stretch back further than you might think. In 1952 Marilyn Monroe told Life magazine that all she wore to bed was Chanel No. 5. In 1991 Elizabeth Taylor launched her iconic bestseller White Diamonds, which has made more than two billion dollars in sales since. These were the original Hollywood celebrity scents.

So, what magic formula results in the enduring appeal of the celebrity fragrance – and why are they such huge money makers? Britney’s Curious made 100 million dollars in its first year alone. According to a 2013 Daily Express report, a Spears fragrance was sold every 15 seconds. The Daily Mail claimed in 2012 that J Lo was making more money from her fragrances than from her music. This is partly because fragrance has some of the biggest profit margins in the whole beauty industry. The author and fragrance expert Tania Sanchez describes how “product like this this is mostly dilution. The actual perfume oil in one of these scents probably equates to no more than a few pounds. And then you put it in a bottle, and you mark it up – and these are generally not at all cheap.”

Another reason celebrities create perfumes is their potential for psychological closeness. You can smell perfume but cannot see it. And most people have never met their favourite celebrities, so have no idea what they smell like; launching their own fragrances gave consumers a tantalising hint. Just as you have the same hours in a day as Beyoncé, when you put on a fragrance by her – or another favourite A-Lister – you could smell like them, too.

A celebrity fragrance is also an affordable entry point for many fans. Where designer clothing or a jet-set lifestyle are out of reach for the masses, there’s an attainable aspect to perfumes; for the cost of one bottle, you are transported into the fantasy world of your chosen A-lister. Sanchez describes the ancient practises of alchemy where it was believed you could transfer the essence of a rare material such as gold. “The one place the soul of alchemy is still alive is in perfumery – you take the soul out of a jasmine and you apply it to somebody and they smell like jasmine. That’s in a way what’s happening with celebrity perfume: you essentially suck some of the essence of, say, Jennifer Lopez and apply it to yourself, and in so doing transform slightly and briefly into her and her world.” It’s a form of parasocial interaction, where wearers of these scents feel closer to the celebrity in question in a completely one-sided way.

In recent years, celebrity cosmetics and skincare lines appear to be the modern answer to the celebrity fragrance, and the rise sees no signs of abating. New lines are launched seemingly every other week, from Alicia Keys’ Keys SoulCare to Lady Gaga’s Haus Laboratories and Jennifer Lopez’s J Lo Beauty (you can even watch a flawless Lopez apply all the products in a “morning routine” on IGTV in which she appears in her pyjamas, looking about 25, insisting “this is not staged, this is my actual bathroom and this is what it looks like every single day”.) The closeness is further enhanced by social media and, of course, it facilitates you to shop all the products used at the click of a button.

Whether or not these lines will suffer the same crash as before remains to be seen, but many celebrities have pivoted away from using their own name in the skincare branding in order to distance themselves from the noughties concept of a celebrity beauty launch. Take Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, for example. Rihanna herself has 11 fragrances to her name – the earliest launching in 2010 and the most recent in 2018. But her new and first scent for Fenty enters a new arena of luxe beauty. When it launched on the 10 August in the US it immediately sold out, and it is hotly anticipated in the UK. This fragrance, with its mix of magnolia and musk, contains none of the associations with her previous scents like Kiss, Nude and Crush, and she worked on it with the celebrated perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, who is known for his creations at Louis Vuitton.

So what are the new generation of modern celebrity scents really like? “They took me by surprise,” says Sanchez of Lopez’s new fragrance One and Ariana Grande’s God Is A Woman. “Celebrity perfume had really reached some pretty drastic depths last time I checked in, but these are actually not bad at all.” Long gone are the vanilla sweet gourmands of a decade ago. “We’ve gone really far away from the sort of standard pretty floral celebrity perfume that we had,” she adds. She describes Grande’s scent as a herbal floral with a hint of berry; it’s clear that it’s not “the sort of childhood cheap candy” many think of when it comes to these formulations. The perfumer who created Ariana Grande’s God is a Woman, Jérome Epinette, is also behind a slew of Byredo fragrances, including cult favourites Sundazed and Bal d’Afrique. Another of her scents, R.E.M., was a finalist in this year’s Fragrance Foundation Awards.

When it comes to Lopez’s One, Sanchez notes that “J Lo is actually the stealth Madonna, because she’s been on trend the entire time she has been working”. The new fragrance is what she terms a mild-mannered, subdued floral – not the glitzy loud scents one would associate with the Lopez of Hustlers or ‘Jenny from the Block’. “If you put this in an Hermès bottle and gave it to me and said it was their latest launch I would probably believe you,” she confesses.

So, next time you walk into a department store hunting for your future fragrance, don’t instantly turn your nose up at the celebrity section – the modern iterations might just be your next cult find.

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