On The Correlation of Celebrity Perfumes and An Ensuing Career Demise

There is no short supply of celebrity fragrances in this life. In general, becoming famous automatically means you’ll eventually have to brand your own scent. From the stripper-friendly aroma of Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday to the fruity overtones (does anyone really want to smell like kiwi) of Britney Spears’ Fantasy, the scent of your perfume is who you are as a celebrity. And yet, strangely enough, the manufacturing of your own tailored scent to the masses is not a sign of success, but rather, an admission of current or impending failure.

Although Lady Gaga already released a “unisex” scent called Fame (featuring, among other notes, incense and saffron), the latest fragrance she’s pushing comes at a time when there’s really not much else going on in her career. And so, why not make a perfume commercial that’s so cliche in nature it almost seems like parody? In black and white, a mass of bodies touching, the whole fucking gamut.

Between engaging in weird old lady duets with Tony Bennett and continuing to try to live down her uncomfortable duet with R. Kelly, it’s easy to understand why Gaga would flock to the task of peddling some perfume: it’s safe, presumably surefire money and no one can really criticize her for her “art” because all perfumes are bound to the same rules of marketing and the contents of the fragrance itself (typically generic in nature).

And so it goes that the number of perfumes a celebrity–particularly a female pop star–releases is in direct correlation to how badly her career is flailing. Case in point, Britney Spears has approximately fifteen that are all variations on the same original two (Curious and Fantasy). Because if all you have to do with yourself is imbue the collective olfactory with your Midwest demographic-friendly scent, you’ve clearly got too much time on your hands–the mark of fledgling public interest.