As I was walking up the stairs towards the dentist's surgery, the other day, I wrinkled my nose in response to a dullish, dank smell. My instant assumption was that the building had developed a problem with rising damp or mildew since my last visit and that something should be done to prevent it from falling down; but, half-way up the stairs, I realised my fears were unfounded. On the first landing, on which the damp smell was overpowering, sat a little bottle filled with sticks, bearing a label that read "Green Tea and Cucumber Room Fragrance".
'Eurgh,' I thought, 'it smells of pondwater.' And then I stopped to wonder why anybody thought it would smell any other way. Who actually likes the smell of green tea? Or, to make the emphasis more clear, who actually likes the smell of green tea? Who lifts a cup of green tea to their lips and thinks, 'Wow, what a wonderful fragrance, I'd love to smell of it'?
I'm thinking nobody, and a quick and highly scientific Google experiment demonstrates my point. A search for "I love the smell of green tea" yields 10 results; but compare that to 392 for "I love the smell of strawberries", 2,140 for "i love the smell of roses" and a tied 4,900 for each of "leather" and "petrol". And yet these ludicrous green tea products sell like pondwater-scented hot cakes. There's not only the room fragrance sticks: there are green tea bubble baths, green tea scented candles, green tea incenses, green tea bloody everything.
Why, then, if nobody actually likes the smell of green tea, do these things sell so well? If people don't like the way they smell, they must be buying them for - well, some other reason, and unfortunately I think the other reason is disappointingly obvious. Fragrances don't sell because of the way they smell; they sell because of the image with which they're associated. Green tea makes people think of health, detoxification, airy white rooms, yoga, freshness, clarity, simplicity; in short, green tea represents a lifestyle, not a scent.
Of course, most fragrances attempt to associate themselves with a lifestyle to some extent: this is why perfume adverts are vastly more likely to feature Nicole Kidman posing on a red carpet in slow-motion than any kind of description of what the fragrance actually smells like. But at least the rubbishy celeb fragrances are honest about their shamelessly simplistic associations with Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez. These endless green tea fragrances are pulling exactly the same trick except that their attempts to associate themselves with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna are dishonest, underhanded and unofficial; and, for these reasons, I have significantly less respect for them.
