PresentTense: The Beckhams launched their his'n'hers perfumes this week. Giving it the oddly unsettling name of Intimately Beckham, they made the news thanks to an advertising campaign that features David grabbing Victoria's bottom, while he attempts not to betray his surprise at discovering that she suddenly has one.
It is not Beckham's first fragrance. The World Cup build-up was littered with ads for bottles of his Instinct. If I wasn't mistaken when taking a quick sniff in Boots during the week, that cologne carries notes of grapefruit, cardamom seeds and - why, yes! - a hint of patchouli. It's all very well, but given his poor form of late and omission from the English squad, it seems possible that the Real Madrid star has been spending too long in the laboratory perfecting the higher tones of mandarin leaf than practising his free kicks; that his olfactory obsession has turned him into a a mad professor, surrounded by bunsen burners and bubbling beakers, occasionally screaming "Another hint of jasmine, Igor!"
To be honest, the above joke was inspired by/stolen from an old issue of satirical magazine The Onion, which in 2003 featured the headline "Celine Dion Secluded in Lab Perfecting Perfume", and accompanied it with a doctored picture of the Canadian chanteuse in white coat. Only a couple of years ago, the celebrity perfume was still something of a novelty and the notion that a star had anything to do with the complex chemical processes of creating an entirely new odour was somewhat ludicrous. Luckily for the perfume houses, it turned out to be a profitable wheeze. By the end of last year, celebrity-branded scents made up 23 per cent of a $2.9 billion (€2.3 billion) market.
Almost everyone who is even marginally more famous than the average busker has a fragrance either on the market or in development. Jennifer Lopez, Maria Sharapova, Paris Hilton, Naomi Campbell and Donald Trump have each bottled their distinctive aromas. Britney Spears has recently sold more perfume than records (her scent features bursts of Louisiana magnolia, with faded undertones of trash). There is Believe by Ronan Keating and Cliff Richard's Devil Woman. Big Brother's Jade Goody has a perfume called Shh, which is selling enough bottles to convince you that it can't all be down to desperate winos.
The next step up? Scents of the city. The Washington Post recently went on a sniffing safari with a perfume-maker, Laurice Rahme. Inhaling the stench of the New York street, they found "hints of rotten mustard, a soupcon of ammonia, undertones of armpit". Rahme was invited along because she has developed perfumes named after famous New York neighbourhoods, giving them titles such as Broadway Nite and Madison Soiree. "The fragrance of New York," it is called, rather bravely given that New York is famous for being putrid rather than perfumed. It would be like asking Shane MacGowan to brand his own range of aftershave.
Rahme likes to clarify that it not the actual smell of the city, but its "soul". She was inspired by 9/11, she explains. Thank God some good came out of that dreadful day.
No one could seriously market a range of fragrances based on the aromas of Dublin, where the recent heatwave stirred the pong of the city's alleys and bins until a stroll down parts of Grafton Street was likely to incite a riot in your gag reflex. Still, there have been crazier ideas. So, perhaps it's time to trademark L'eau de Liffey, with its soupcon of effluent, and undertones of shopping trolley.
The real money, though, will be in celebrity smells for some time yet. Despite their popularity, however, most can only dream of winning a major prize at the FiFi Awards, the perfume industry's annual version of the Oscars. For a man unlikely to win an actual Oscar, though, it's been an award-winning year for Antonio "Zorro" Banderas, with his Spirit Antonio Banderas for Women named Perfume of the Year (Women's Popular Fragrance category). How worthwhile those fictional late hours in the lab must now seem.
In the less glamorous category of Best Packaging, Celine Dion walked away with the prize, while Sarah Jessica Parker's perfume took the gong for best National Advertising Campaign (Television), suggesting that it looked better than it smelled. But no one ever remembers the technical categories.
As it happens, there is a FiFi award for Editorial Excellence in Fragrance Coverage, won this year by Elle magazine's ground-breaking article on "Modern Vintage". Some consolation, no doubt, for being so scandalously overlooked for the Pulitzer Prize. Fragrance coverage has, of course, given us some of the greats of modern journalism, even if none of them readily springs to mind right now. Nonetheless, it is sure to be a competitive category at next year's FiFi awards. Indeed, in some quarters this very article is being touted as a serious contender. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I smell victory.
