Perfume Heaven - Style Over Substance?

So today I want to talk about perfume basically because I was lucky enough to receive perfume from three of my favourite brands, Orla Kiely, Marc Jacobs and Lush this Christmas.The funny thing is these three perfume brands perfectly sum up the three strands that make up my personal style - classic, fun and hippy chic.

In the spirit of sharing my passion about these perfume brands and my fetish for glass I dreamt up my own mini campaign inspired by my bottle of Orla Kiely perfume. I'm really into toffee and caramel tones at the moment and although I find it a difficult colour to wear I love wearing accessories in that tone, as you can see from the image above.The Orla Kiely design is so chic and sweet with it's toffee coloured flower shaped stopper and long glass bottle.

 I immediately fell for it's vintage charm, it has a real Art Deco feel, I can imagine Daisy from The Great Gatsby using it on her dressing table. Featured in my campaign is a vintage silk scarf, a favourite necklace I was given and a sweet vintage family of china horses I inherited  recently, I loved the idea that the mare and her two foals stumble across the bottle whilst on a walk and are curious about what it is. I arranged the bottle on the background of my silk scarf to look like  a fallen log.

Although I love all the perfumes featured, all of which are made up of floral notes with the exception of chocolate in the Orla Kiely scent, (thanks Orla!) I'm going to talk packaging.There is a lot of pressure for brands to scale down packaging right now, for obvious reasons, and I find it interesting the route Lush Cosmetics has taken with their unusual fragrances dreamt up by Mark Constantine inspired by road trips and music rather than the usual celebrity led fragrances. Although the bottles are minimalistic like my bottle of Euphoria featured here, more like something you would find in a chemistry lab (the larger bottles comes with a pipette) the artwork on the front of each paper label is like a unique album cover and each one tells its own story taken from the personal experiences of members of the company rather than celebrity.

But ask me if I would be happy to receive my perfume in a plain glass bottle for half the price and unless I had a pretty bottle to decant it into I'm afraid the answer would have to be no. I know I'm being silly because I'm paying in effect half the money I spent on the creation of the bottle, but for me that's half the pleasure, I get as excited about the stopper on the perfume bottle as I do about the bottle itself, predictably my dressing table is littered with empty perfume bottles making me look a little like a perfume addict, when it's the bottle I can't bear to be be parted from, not necessarily the fragrance. I like to change my fragrances but always prefer to invest in parfum (which is increasingly hard to find) as it lasts much longer on my skin. Someone should come up with some exciting new ways to showcase perfume bottles I think it would have the same popularity as a walk-in shoe wardrobe only on a much smaller scale.

So that brings me neatly to my most flamboyant bottle of perfume I was thrilled to receive this Christmas, Dot by Marc Jacobs, it's basically like Jacobs has crammed every girl crush imaginable into the space of one bottle, pearls, polka dots, red, lady bugs, butterfly wings and as is his design signature for perfume, included yet again an outrageously large stopper.

In accordance with the ritual of using a perfume bottle I'm led by my eye first and my nose second when it comes to the the Orla Kiely and Marc Jacobs scents, I treat them like they are glam props which help transport me to a world of high glamour, so if I'm wearing vintage its the Orla bottle I reach for, if I'm feeling in the mood for breaking rules and having fun with my wardrobe its over to Marc, but if I am in need of a pick me up and its purely about feeling better then I opt for Euphoria.

Final thoughts? I think it's no coincidence that most of my perfume choices now hail from design houses not celebrities. Advertising campaigns alone are not enough to entice me to buy into a scent, a thing of beauty is generally well thought out and has lasting appeal long after the contents are gone. So yes I have lots of biscuit tins and used lipstick bullets all over my home relative to my obsession for beautiful packaging but I think it is money well spent and if you enjoy the contents even better!