Lavender was a key ingredient in the bougie domestic fantasy sold by retailers like Williams Sonoma and L’Occitane en Provence. It wafted gently over the entire oeuvre of Peter Mayle, the author of “A Year in Provence,” among other books.
Now you can buy Downy Infusions Lavender Serenity fabric softener.
— Read more at Why Does Everything Smell, So Peacefully, of Lavender? at The New York Times.
Haven’t read the article, but why does the NYTimes always have to sound so snobby? That’s a more interesting question….
Pretty sure it is written into their mission statement.
I did read the article and yes some products do smell like and contain real lavender. However many commercial products like laundry detergents, scented candles, plug-ins etc. available in the grocery store don’t. So really everything doesn’t smell so peacefully of lavender! The product might have the word in its name but it’s just some perfume concocted in a lab likely with none of the natural scent or its benefits in it at all. I wonder if the writer did any actual research by smelling these products or just went by the product’s names?
While I was at the NYT site I also read the article about the recent Dior Sauvage ad campaign that’s been pulled. Here, and in other articles, I keep reading that the scent has been around since 1966. We all know Eau Sauvage was released that year but Sauvage which is another scent entirely hit the market in 2015 and a few flankers have been spawned since then. Despite the fact that these are two different lines in the collection of Dior scents, will Eau Sauvage feel the negative effects of Sauvage’s advertising? Again, not enough reasearch on the part of the NYT writer to differentiate between the two lines.
I have also seen the opposite…articles that say Sauvage was introduced in 2015 and don’t mention Eau Sauvage at all or seem aware of its existence.
Also very few articles have mentioned possibly the most egregious part of the campaign, a live launch event in which models dressed up as Indians. (And I have run out of free NYT articles so don’t know if they mentioned it.)
But personally I doubt either scent’s sales will change much if at all.