Young consumers between the ages of 16 and 22 prefer fresh fragrances with watery, hesperide or fruity notes, according to an international marketing study carried out by German flavor and fragrance manufacturer Symrise between 2008 and 2009.
— From Symrise sniffs out young adult olfactory tastes at Cosmeticnews.
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Prefer? Or have been trained to accept after being bludgeoned with years of marketing? Harrumph.
This is the same logic that has little kids “preferring” so called kid-food (pizza, chicken nuggets etc.). Well, yeah, sure, it’s the easiest thing if they haven’t eaten anything else. Meanwhile, in French elementary schools they’re downing lentils and fish and all manner of things quite happily…
I couldn’t agree more. What I find even more insidious is that there seems to be an expectation that young women shouldn’t be/like anything more complex than sugary, vapid little confections.
I really wish my lunch came from a French public school.
I’m envious of my friend who studied abroad in Grenoble and couldn’t get over that they gave out mini bottles (or carafes or something) of wine in the university cafeteria with lunch and dinner. At the institution where I work, they barely even allow adults to drink. HA!
I spent a substantial amount of time in Italy (Veneto), and every family meal was served with half spritzer, half wine. Delicious.
Absolutely!!!
yeah, I agree with Robin too….I want the french school lunch.
Meanwhile, the French kids I know love McDonald’s. ;-D
Oh sure, I know, McD’s has done great over there. Processed food full of sugar, fat and salt caters to our animal instincts–we can’t help but love it. It’s just that it’s not necessarily natural to love *only* that and reject everything else. Just FYI–I read about those meals in the New Yorker in a long article on an American woman’s crusade to change the American school lunch programs. (Not Alice Waters, someone more middle ground actually employed by the school system. Very cool stuff, wish I could remember her name.) But I hear the public schools are cutting back on their lunch programs in the current crisis…better hurry over there…
Ann Cooper, in Berkeley. I liked that article too.
I thought France was one of the few places on earth that don’t have a McDonalds?
I once ate a double cheeseburger in Venice. A sacrilege? I don’t know… I thought it was funny.
I ate one in Milan!
Why do French kids only eat one egg for breakfast?
Because one egg is an oeuf…
Ha!
Thank you, Sweetlife! I also get tired of reading how “kids prefer” this and “kids prefer” that, when it’s the adult world that has created these choices, usually for reasons of cheap production costs, and has spent millions in advertising them. How would kids know whether they’d prefer something else, if that’s the majority of offerings in the mall (or the school cafeteria)?
I do think it’s true that young women no longer want to smell like their parents…everyone now wants to smell younger, not older. That’s not how it used to be. What seems sad to me is that such a huge proportion of fragrances are geared towards this very young age group. They probably spend more on grooming, but still — don’t see how it helps to make 500 new fruity florals a year.
I agree, Robin, about girls not wanting to smell like their mothers, but I think the current crop of scents has more to do with the insane push for everyone to stay young and inoffensive than it does with teen rebellion. (In the next backlash not smelling like Mom will mean wearing Opium, Angel, etc. and it will be the eighties all over again and people will be retro-mad. Whoops, already happening isn’t it…) I often think that as women have begun to have some real economic and political power there’s been a concurrent cultural push to keep them worried about getting older (and, not coincidentally, more powerful). There used to be some advantages–even sexual advantages–to growing up.
Oh, I hear you! I HATE the kid-targeted foods. My son saw an ad for a Kid Cuisine frozen meal and insisted on trying it. I told him it would give him diarrhea… I got it, he ate it, got diarrhea, and that was the end of his journey into crap kid meals. His fave veggie is edamame. I’m so thankful for good food! He actually enjoy shopping at Whole Foods because he gets to try new things.
My son begged for those too, and I then refused to admit how bad it was even though he really couldn’t make himself finish eating it. Ugh.
Completely ridiculous. I’m 20 and have never cared for fresh or aquatic or fruity scents. I think that those are just the types of scents marketed towards this age group, so that is what they purchase. It would seem that marketing particular things to a certain demographic has a lot to do with controlling trends in the retail industry.
Hard to say which is the chicken & which is the egg.
I’m 38 and I do love the much-disdained aquatics in L’Eau D’Issey in parfum or EDT. I know it’s frowned upon but I can’t help it. I also wear Aqva Bvlgari for men. Having grown up next to the ocean, it works for me.
Gosh, I have no disdain for L’Eau d’Issey. I’m sick of aquatics because they’re ubiquitous, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with them.
young girls are into pretty, sparkly bottles. as long as the topnotes are “pretty”, they don’t really care about anything else.
Wow…I would disagree.
I’m sure not all young girls are into nothing but the bottle, but there are certainly a number of lines that sell based on that — Harajuku Lovers, for instance. And I do think the popularity of things like Marc Jacobs Daisy & Lola, the Vera Wang Princess line, etc, are largely based on the bottle.
I’d say I know a lot of women in their 30′s who like that stuff, too, though. And even though I’m long past my expiration date now, when I was young (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) I aspired to wear Chanel, and made do with Lou Lou and Poison. (I think I even wore Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion at one point, which does seem ghastly.)
Gosh, now you mention it, I aspired to Chanel in my 20s too, and somehow managed a 50ml splash bottle of No. 19 EDT. Funny, I’d forgotten about that phase until this moment. Noting Robin’s point above, I definitely wanted to smell older, not younger. I was one of those that wanted to be taken seriously. Nowadays I have the confidence to not care so much. So I moderate my classic perfume collection with a few celebuscents here and there, but NO fruity florals. I like my strawberries fresh off the bush, thanks very much, not out of a scent bottle.
I’m even older than that, & I bought the Harajuku Lovers solids! So did not mean to say it was restricted to the very young…
Totally agree. The bottles are so damn cute, even if the juice is meh.
I am 16 years old and I have never liked aquatic, ozonic or fruity/floral fragrances. I was always into the heavy ones, classics or rich gourmand perfumes. All the girls from my grade of school are using fruity/florals. And the boys only have sporty colognes :/ When I wear one of my perfumes, most of them will say: ,,Your perfume is horrible!”.
Good for you! Ignore the philistines
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with anyone, whatever age, wearing the omnipresent fruity florals, but I still say good for you for bucking the trend! (And I think those boys who object are “pigtail-pullers”, if you get my drift…)
Agree — wear what makes you happy!
This makes me think about the new Alberta Ferretti, which I happened to test today at lunch time.
It was so generic…and smelled so much like everything else,”fruity, hesperidic and watery”.
I drowned my disappointment at the Gueralin counter, with a big spritz of vol de nuit.
(But I guess I sprayed too much, because it made me feel sick anyway… well, at least I got drunk with champagne, as opposed to sleepy with too much chamomile…)
Oh dear, did it? Too bad, it’s a great bottle.
Hmm. When I was a teenager, I went for fragrances like Halston, etc. I always liked perfumes that had a good amount of wood notes, esp. sandalwood.
Zasie- Thanks for the opinion on AF’s new perfume. I love her designs. Too bad the scent was a disappointment.
I’m not anti-fruity/ floral. Just against not well done.
Here here.
I saw this post and I started grinning. I’m 19 and am proud to say I really, really hate young fruity/ florals (Nina by Nina Ricci anyone?). I started wearing perfume in middle school when my mom gave me a small bottle of L’air du Temps and then continued to wear Chance by Chanel through the tomboy years. Recently, I ran out of my bottle of Infusion d’Iris and am wondering if I can afford Clair de Musc by SL… darn Barney’s is so close by and so tempting or should I wait until I study abroad in Paris next semester to find one?
Decisions Decisions…
Wait for Paris! It will be so much more fun to buy a Serge Lutens there.
And in 30 years fresh fragrances will smell “old lady”, people will be buying “vintage” Britney Spears at ridiculous prices on eBay, and young people will be wearing scents that smell like Secretions Magnifiques.
Ack.
Yeah, that’ll be it!!