Fragrance Perspectives: State of the Art—the Good, the Bad and the Truth

Every year the shelves of perfumeries and discounters are filled with a mass-produced stock of increasingly inferior quality. What ever happened to the great classics of fragrance? Why must every great fragrance be followed by some kind of limited, summer and black edition?

These questions were already answered during previous World Perfumery Congress (WPC) events. There are too many fragrances on the market already. And this trend will not reverse; on the contrary, it will further increase. This appears to be the central dilemma of the fragrance industry: more and more, worse and worse. In this context, I love the following statement, the so-called Sturgeon’s Law (named after the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon). It says: Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Actually, this could be said of all products. Only we don’t think this way because the majority of all products have already undergone a filtering process by the retailers. In addition, most fragrances do not pass the “hi” test and, yet, keep on existing. This is due to the fact that the blockbuster economy is not the only functioning form of economy. But more about this later.

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