Excessive use of potent scents is a divisive issue, one that has characterized Western society’s deep aversion to strong perfume since the Enlightenment. This aversion is, to some degree, physiological, but to a greater extent it is ideological. Perfume is not just a means of enhancing, or masking, our bodily odours, it also operates as a carrier of social mores, particularly in relation to the character and moral standing of women. The shortcomings of women who wear strong scents has been a recurring theme in medical discourse, particularly throughout the nineteenth century, whereby the public were warned that, “The charm of perfumes, the search for ‘base sensations’, symptoms of a ‘soft, lax’ education, increased nervous irritability, led to ‘feminism’, and encouraged debauchery.” (Corbin 1996: 184)

This paper is concerned with the representation and reception of strong scents during the rise of power perfumes in the 1980s. These super-scents breached personal space, and - via their unsubtle names and explicit advertisements - constructed and reinforced mythologies of sex, transgression, decadence, power, exoticism and glamour. One did not require an advanced understanding of semiotics to decode the message contained within, or upon, these bottles.

Drawing upon autobiographical research and existing theories of production and consumption, it will trace a link between the moral panic aroused by manufactured, pungent aromas throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the subversion of those risqué connotations to market perfumes in the 1980s.
Attention will be given the multi-sensorial nature of perfume marketing, how perfume is experienced in everyday life and the tension that exists between the phenomenological and the culturally constructed in our olfactory preferences.