By Erin Aubry, LA Times
PERFUME IS MY greatest refuge. To be blunt, it keeps the stink of the real world at bay in a way that a million other divertissements can't.
Perfume is also forgiving. Unlike fashion, scent doesn't mock a would-be wearer for not being a size 4 or for having a short torso. It's the great social equalizer of luxury items.
Most women can afford it ($50 or thereabouts for nice cologne) and, thanks to quirks of the chemical interaction between skin and scent, a poor woman can actually smell better in Chanel No. 5 than a well-off woman in the same scent.Best of all, perfume is invisible, impossible to flaunt in the way double-C logos or whipstitched pockets on $300 jeans are routinely flaunted on purses and posteriors. Perfume always manages to say more about the woman than it does about itself.
Which is why I fall so easily, sometimes eagerly, for those ad campaigns that assure a woman she is buying a scent that finally captures essential femininity, or mystery, or daring or passion. Ridiculous, but it just might be possible — I may be exactly what that scent needs to deliver on its promise.
The latest perfume ad campaign by Banana Republic brings this crucial fantasy thudding to Earth by injecting race into it. It's not simply that the name of the scent, Alabaster, is stone synonymous with the color white — that's fine.I like rocks and sculptures. I like clouds and sandy beaches. And alabaster, as anyone who has seen L.A.'s cathedral windows knows, comes in many colors.
I can find my inner alabaster or, failing that, create one.
The problem is that the Alabaster ad circumvents imagination by giving us photos of an overtly sexy, nude, pale, very blond woman who somehow leaves no doubt as to what Alabaster is: white skin and, more broadly, whiteness.
This scent celebrates not stone, not sculpture, not sand, but more likely cloistered, fair-skinned maidens and even Southern belles.
Now, Banana Republic is also currently selling a perfume called Rosewood and one called Jade, perhaps with the idea of reaching a wider-than-white audience (or paying homage to select elements of the Earth).But the only one with a major ad campaign that I've seen is Alabaster. And the femininity this ad boasts of capturing is not an invitation to a black woman like me but a taunt, and one that echoes through the centuries.
This is not a mirror inviting my gaze, as I expect from a perfume, but a roped-off portrait that has me nowhere in it. I can't even pretend.
Other contemporary perfumes flirt with whiteness-as-exclusivity — Estee Lauder's White Linen, Liz Taylor's White Diamonds.
But Estee Lauder is too genteel to aggressively push its society-lady cred, and Liz was always more about the exotica of bling — the emphasis is on diamonds, not white (a complementary line that debuted later, Black Pearls, made the point).
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