Scentsational Greetings makes scented greeting cards: you gently rub the front of the cards to release the fragrance. Shown above: one of their vanilla-scented cards; you'll also find cards in lavender, coffee, rose, ocean breeze, lemon, Christmas tree, gingerbread and peppermint. They're in some retail stores (mostly in California at the moment) and they've also got an Etsy shop.
Dear Scentsational Greetings, please make me a holiday card that smells like i Profumi di Firenze Spezie dè Medici.
Market data from the NPD group for luxury fragrances in 2007 showed that they failed to match the success of their counterparts in the luxury skin care and make-up categories, with overall sales slipping 1 percent to $2.5bn
However, sales of fragrances that have been on the market since 2006 or before grew by two percent suggesting that consumers are returning to well-known and trusted products.
"It may be that consumers are finding comfort in familiar brands because of the crowded marketplace," said NPD analyst Karen Grant.
— From Stars launch new fragrances in time for Christmas at Cosmetics Design.
Christina Aguilera’s second fragrance with Procter & Gamble is the newly launched Inspire. Her last fragrance, the eponymous Christina Aguilera, launched in 2007 but never made it to the US, and I can’t say I thought it any great loss. It was a not particularly memorable sweet floriental; this new one is supposed to be “a modern take on the Pop Art era” + a reflection of “the energy and excitement” of Tokyo. I haven’t any notion of what such a thing ought to smell like, but in the event it turns out to be a tuberose-based floral.
According to a P&G spokesperson quoted at Women’s Wear Daily earlier this year, Aguilera “loves tuberose fragrances but they tend to be a bit heavy so we kept working on it to make it more young”. I’d say they succeeded. Inspire is a white floral, as advertised, but it’s a very modern white floral…
Scentmap is a new online tool that aims to “navigate shoppers through the often daunting process of choosing a fragrance”. You select the name of a fragrance that you currently like, and Scentmap makes suggestions of other scents that might suit you. A “remote control” on the right column allows you to fine-tune the selections to fit your specifications…
French luxury jeweler Poiray has launched a limited edition eponymous signature fragrance (a prior Poiray fragrance, launched in 1999, is no longer on the market). Inspired by Poiray's Indranî collection, and in particular a pink opal ring, the new scent is meant to be an “olfactive jewel”…