Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 60

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remembered is up to you." All 1 have pointed out about the ancient,
prinutive, and sexual base of olfaction is confirmed in a 1988 ad for
Musk: "Natural. Untamed. You’ve been civilized long enough!" It
promises to "unleash your most primitive instincts."
The relatively recent technology of the scent strip has, if
anything, further reduced the need for a linguistic description of the
product. Instead, ads offer a touch of the product itself, in its near
inunateriality, yet powerful sensory presence the most direct appeal
ever. Yet perfume ad designers are of course not ignorant of the central
mechanism at work. Trygg Engen, one of the foremost researchers in
olfactory chemistry, physiology, and sociology, sums it up: it is not
the perfume that makes a woman unforgettable, it is the woman who
nuikes the perfume memorable. Beautiful women-or at least parts of
them—have therefore remained an important stimulus of visual
association in p>erfume advertising. But memory can also be aided by
the shape and material appearance of the bottle itself, on which
great emphasis is placed. Romeo Gigli provides an excellent example
for this approach. A bottle with a fantastically shaped top is paired
with a slogan that could hardly be truer: "A perfume that reminds
you of a woman who reminds you of a perfume."
As if in compensation for its linguistic shortcomings, the olfactory
realm opens up rich possibilities for associative and auratic
codification, a sheer inexhaustible realm of signification. This realm
is precise in its reference structure (the smell of . . . ), accurate or at
least unhesitating in its binary evaluation (good/bad), but extremely
unpredictable in its psychological, associative impact on individuals.
This adds to the medium's (post)modem appeal in the present age,
where individuality, uniqueness, and a neo-primitive chic are part of
the auratic characteristics that our consumer society of standardized
production builds up as its own ideologically sanctioned countervalues. Perfumes can fulfill that role supremely well.
Overall, of course, it is vision that serves as the leading sense in
Western (possibly in every) culture and provides the dominant
metaphoric reference system underlying language. To be invisible,
therefore, means to be virtually untouched by the process of
enlightenme