FOR fragrance companies, it was a white-knuckled Christmas.
Evan Sung for The New York Times
Aedes De Venustas, plush boutique in the West Village, specializes in hard-to-find scents. Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé and Katy Perry all introduced their first perfumes last year.
It’s long been known that December sales of fragrances can make or break the entire year. Indeed, a perfume’s annual performance can be determined by purchases not only the week before Christmas, but those of the morning of the 25th, said Karen Grant, vice president for beauty at the NPD Group, a market research firm.
So which new fragrances won over crowds in 2010? The leading women’s contenders that had their debuts last year, according to NPD, were Gucci Guilty, which is blingily packaged and smells fruity enough to eat; and Chanel’s Chance Eau Tendre, a sweet-floral sequel to the original Chance. Men favored Bleu de Chanel and Ralph Lauren’s Big Pony collection of four fragrances in vivid numbered bottles.
Final annual tallies from NPD won’t be available until later this month. However, Ms. Grant dared to hope for “at least a flat year,” which would be an improvement, she said, considering that “fragrance has pretty much been in decline, except for a few years with celebrity fragrances” since 2001.
Still, a designer fragrance remains a quintessential holiday gift because it’s seen as a way to bestow an affordable whiff of luxury from top-tier brands. Introduced this fall, Bleu de Chanel was not only a top Christmas seller for Bloomingdale’s, but the chain’s biggest men’s fragrance premiere ever, said Howard Kreitzman, its vice president for cosmetics and fragrances.
Often a fragrance beckons to a certain age demographic, but Bleu stands out for its “very, very broad base of appeal,” Mr. Kreitzman said, adding “You can give it to a teenage son and you can give it to your dad.” Other men’s holiday hits for Bloomingdale’s included Marc Jacobs’s Bang and Bulgari Man. For women, Gucci Guilty, Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Gioia and Yves Saint Laurent’s Belle d’Opium sold briskly.
Gone, however, are the days when one blockbuster fragrance could dominate the landscape, as when consumers were transfixed by Christian Dior’s Poison in the 1980s or Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium in the ’70s. “Everyone tried to wear these fragrances,” said Bettina O’Neill, the vice president for cosmetics and fragrances at Barneys New York. “But eventually you realize you can’t carry it off.”
A saturated market has also helped put an end to the behemoth fragrances of old. Every single year since 2000, there have been more fragrances put out into the world than in the two decades from 1970 to 1989, according to NPD. It used to be enough to attach a celebrity to a scent to get a hit (See Sean John’s Unforgivable for men from 2006), but now “you have to do more with them, more marketing, more novelty packaging to gain traction and visibility,” said Ms. Grant of NPD. Not even Beyoncé Heat was in the top 20 for women’s fragrances in department stores, she said.
Moreover, these days plenty of fragrance lovers want to express their individuality with hard-to-find scents, Ms. O’Neill said. “People are more educated, and women especially don’t want to smell like everyone else,” she said. The women’s scents at Barneys that did well over the holidays included Byredo Parfums’ M/Mink ($195 for 100 milliliters), which has notes of patchouli leaf, clover honey and dark amber.
Two men’s scents that were not 2010 releases also performed well, Ms. O’Neill said: the Italian brand Bois 1920’s Classic ($180 for 100 milliliters), and the California brand Gendarme’s original cologne ($75 for 4 ounces). All in all, she said, their fragrance sales have bounced back from the dire days of 2009.
And despite costing $300 for 100 milliliters, a new Frédéric Malle, Portrait of a Lady, with notes of spices and Turkish rose essence, sold well at Barneys and Aedes de Venustas, the perfume boutique in the West Village, where Robert Gerstner, an owner, stocks hard-to-find fragrances as a way to thumb his nose at mass-market perfumes.
“We are individuals; we want to discover things,” Mr. Gerstner said, noting that the signature house scent ($185 for 3.4 ounces) did well this holiday, along with a pomegranate eau de cologne from the 400-year-old Santa Maria Novella ($110 for 3.3 ounces). “And then we are willing to pay money if the quality is there.”
ESPECIALLY if the “gift” is for themselves. “It was a weird Christmas,” said Laurice Rahmé, the founder of Bond No. 9, the company that makes fragrances inspired by New York neighborhoods, which will open its fifth store near the High Line in April. People “splurged on fragrances for themselves, but for gift-giving we’ve never sold so many small fragrances, like the 50 milliliters.” Some of its limited-edition bottles — like one for Chandelier Amphora, filled with 42 ounces of one of their 43 scents — sold out, at $2,500 to $3,500 apiece. Less favored relatives got a $170 50-milliliter bottle of the popular scent Washington Square, which contains hints of geranium and tarragon.
And what’s in store for 2011? Oud, a woodsy note, will continue its migration into the mainstream. In 2007, Tom Ford’s Private Blend collection included Oud Wood. “When we did that fragrance, oud was not as talked about, but now there have been quite a few introductions from well-known companies as well as lesser-known companies,” said Karyn Khoury, the senior vice president for corporate fragrance development of the Estée Lauder companies, including Tom Ford.
Also coming soon: David Yurman’s fragrance trio, the Essence collection — Delicate, Fresh and Exotic — each $85 for 3.4 ounces, to be sold exclusively at Bloomingdale’s in February, and a “flanker” (as sequels are called in the fragrance business) to Marc Jacobs’s Daisy, called Eau So Fresh.
Karen Dubin, the director of Sniffapalooza, which stages events for fragrance enthusiasts, predicts that ambrox, a musky, ambery molecule, found in M/Mink and Le Labo’s Another 13, will be the “new go-to ingredient” in niche fragrance. Ms. Dubin, whose organization has hundreds of thousands of members worldwide, also thinks powdery scents are due for a comeback — led by Love, Chloé, by the French fashion house, which contains what she called “a dusty veil” from the ingredient heliotrope. “I love the whole concept of smelling like vintage cosmetics and makeup, a sort of sweet powder smell,” Ms. Dubin enthused about Love, Chloé, which is sold exclusively at Saks Fifth Avenue until February.
For those who want to secure something exclusive to put under next year’s tree: ThreeASFOUR, a fragrance curated by the Parisian boutique Colette in 2005 and named for the fashion house, will be brought back by Aedes de Venustas this summer in a slightly tweaked formulation containing three elements of the original: vetiver, ginger and iris. Only 1,000 bottles will be available to start.
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