Commodity in the Realm of the Flesh

by M.P.S Simpson

⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅🏰 this piece is part of PRINCESS, our second digital collection of works. PRINCESS responds to the problematic of modern princessdom through pieces by theorists, writers, and artists. 🏰⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅

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Conceptually speaking, perfume operates similarly to that of corsets, girdles, SPANX, or push-up bras. Albeit, some practices corsetry a la tightlacing—a method of physically and quasi-permanently altering the shape of one’s body through extreme waist-training—for the most part, these methods of physical curation are nominally impermanent measures used to manipulate the body to be read in various different ways. It changes the language of the body to those with the tools to read it. Whilst practicing corsetry does not necessarily mean that one does it purely for the sake of others; it would be false to claim that the physical alteration of the body does change the language of gazes that ultimately places one into certain categories. There is a form of bodily semiotics to which the tight-lacer or corset trainer delves within, through the visual language of optical illusion and corporeal shape shifting, to understand the body as a malleable tool capable of physical transformation.

Perfume operates similarly by its method of altering one’s own skin. It effectively, depending on the type of perfume, projects one’s body outward. It creates an aura, a mood-language. It virtually extends the realm of the body into the near atmosphere. In our extended selves, the extension created by the cacophony of objects that embroider the skein of our experience, perfume both figuratively and literally extends ourselves outwards, beyond the confines of our immediacy. When we wear perfume, we invite those who enter into our body’s atmosphere to indulge in the senses. This is because our olfactory sense is primed to pick up alteration—we notice smells when they provide a change in the atmosphere. I can’t tell you with a great degree of certainty what my own skin smells like, but I’m sure someone who has met me for the first time, and who has reached their lips to my cheeks to greet me, could.

But there’s another element that separates the realm of perfume from other bodily alteration; that being the finicky role of desire. For perfume is simulated desire. It is an aesthetic prosthesis, attached to the very organ that marks myself from yourself, the very sheath of subjectivity. It is no surprise then, that perfume as a commodity is filled to its brim with gendered contrivances and archetypal figures. This is in part, unfortunate as it is to say, owing to the complicated matrices of perfume and advertising. Perfume is a tricky beast to sell to the masses: it is not immediately translatable, its qualities are ephemeral, and it is an entirely subjective experience. Unlike a material object that might have a utilitarian use, or a garment that can be shown to be worn in a variety of different ways through modes of styling, perfume’s materiality is near impossible to convey on a one-to-one replicable basis. And so, we have archetypes, fantasies, mythologies. This is easy to delineate from the lineage of perfume advertising that has traipsed behind the chemical and artistic strides to progress that perfume has seen throughout the long 20th century. Comparing Guerlain’s original advertising for L’Huere Bleue—the perfume that came to create the association of powdery notes to a feminine register—to the hyper-stylised and sexualised perfume advertising of the 1990s reveals a starkly un-changed dynamic over the century.

But where does the archetypes leave us, and how do they relate to certain scent profiles? Let’s look at some examples. Sweet and gourmand, that’s for girls. Fresh and aquatic, that’s for men. Powdery is for your grandma, whereas fougeres are for your Dad. These simplified registers dominate a whole language of perfumery, from the nichest of houses to the biggest of brands. Perfume’s marketing tactics exemplifies this turn towards the archetype as a method of advertising. Whereas with other products in the sphere of endless capitalistic circulation, there is no set materialism that companies can use to effectively relay the efficacy of a perfume, the exact feel of it, the exact sensation of it on your skin. Because it is entirely subjective—as perfume reacts differently to different people’s skin. And so, they craft elaborate stories, rely on mythologies, sometimes excavate the threads of Victorian orientalism, and they rely on archetypes.

And here’s what brings us to the archetype of the princess. POV: You smell like a princess straight out of a fairy tale. POV: Suffering from beautiful princess disorder. I’m Evil Princess-Maxxxing. Arabian Princess Vibes. I feel like an opulent, ethereal lychee princess. Sweet & Sultry Ultra Feminine Princess Vibes. I feel like a princess; big ball gowns, fairy godmothers and all. Princessdom totally dominates a certain strain of online perfumery discourse. There’s a throughline of similarity between these perfumes that are often described as ‘princess-like’ within these circles. They’re often very, very, very, very sweet. Almost always this sweetness is translated into a gourmand notation; i.e. of relating to food stuffs. But there’s almost always floral notes too. Typically floral notes from pink and red flowers; roses, peonies, but sometimes white florals, like the funerary lily, or the melancholy violet. They are typified by note that relate to objects of consumption, or objects of decoration. But the real trick comes when these scents are paired with visual semiotics that produce this association between certain scent profiles and certain archetypes that are immediately recognisable. None of us, bar a few select individuals, know what it’s like to be a princess, and what being a princess might smell like. But with the help of archetypes, mythologies and fantasies, we can produce an olfactory-linguistic linkage that helps to cement this connection. Such is the wondrous beauty and the endless power of perfumery’s artistry—its ability to create strong narratological impulses with the drop of an absolute or a pinch of a synthetic material.

The explosion of perfumery as the weapon of choice for luxury consumption is no understatement. The lipstick effect—the economic performance of the beauty market during recessionary periods—has revealed that perfume has nearly replaced makeup as the commodity of choice for younger consumers in this period of global financial instability. In particular, the niche and independent perfumery market has seen the largest up-tick in sales and interest. Sites like Fragrantica receive over 40 million visits in a single month. The global perfume market is estimated to hit over $52bn in 2025 alone, rising by nearly 50% in just ten years. This reveals an element to perfumery that cannot be understated in an era where its popularity as practically exploded. A turn towards the sensual, a turn towards bodily experience in an age dominated by technological abstraction. There is no way to replicate a smell through the internet. It must be experienced in person, it must touch the flesh, it must exist in the tangible world. It helps to produce desire.

But, when we conceptualise desire, is it ours? Or is desire rooted in a permanent reach outwards, an extended finger that never clasps, an elongated arm that never clutches. Byung Chul-Han notes that the function of eros in contemporary society has undergone a form of stasis; a smoothing, a nullifying. In our era of the commodity god, we have transmuted the other into a mere consumption object. When the source of our desires is commodified, eros dies. But the other is a vital totem in the orchestral strings of producing desire. We need othering, in order to form these conceptual ties around us.

But what about when we transform ourselves into a consumption object? It sometimes feels that the human body is not allowed to be as it is. Because really, the body’s natural odours range from fairly neutral to Kristevan abjection. If we were to leave ourselves unwashed, un-deodorised, un-perfumed, our ‘natural’ scent would drift into the realm of abjection, it would conjure negative impulses from those around us. Of course, washing and bathing have been integral pan-culturally since the beginnings of societies as a whole, with many ancient societies possessing rigorous cleanliness habits. However, a cursory scroll through reels or TikTok, and you’ll be greeted with an endlessly array of ‘showering’ and ‘moisturising’ habits that aim not just to effectively clean one’s body, but remove any trace of the body’s naturality. Get out of the shower wet and apply a scented body oil immediately. Put primer on your body so that your perfume lasts longer. Here’s a fourteen step body-care routine. I am not advocating for a crust-punk lifestyle, merely, it appears that this endless desire to remove the undesirable parts of being alive springs forth from a place that aims to make us into perfectly accessible objects of consumption.

When we commodify our own bodies, the very fabric of our beings, and transform them into consumable archetypal tropes—the princess being a core feature endlessly espoused in certain online perfume communities —we obfuscate the complex matrices of desire in the name of our own objectification. We want others to read us in this way, to read us as princess, to read us as consumable objects in the same way that perfume operates as a consumable object. Docile, placid, sweet—hungered after but never hungry. We want our bodies, the very porous cells that construct our physical expressions of personhood, to be modified depending on our mental battlefield.

In this way, the archetype of the princess rears its head through the earthen soil of internet-based perfume discourse. The princess is turned into an object of subjective desire, an object that represents the internal desires produced by the individual. But the archetypal princess here is not the one that devolves and divests its attentions from the worldly, from the vestiges of capitalism that have come to not only dominate our lives but also our internal landscapes. In truth, any image of the body is an image of a fantasy. The archetypes that govern and steer our self-objectification come from both the internal landscape and the external qualities of being-in-the world. Archetypes are, to quote Hillman, psychoid phenomena—it is both produced by the psyche, but also stands entirely separately from it. Archetypal thinking relies on the fantasies and biases that have constructed modern and indeed, postmodern thought. So, what does this have to do with perfume princess-maxxxing? The princess, as conceived within this particular strain of internet culture, is not the princess of emancipatory and liberatory praxis conceived of as a method of self-actualisation by divesting from capital’s tendrils. The perfumed princess has primed themselves into being a creature of pure consumability. The archetype that this relies on is a sort of ‘princess and the pea’ typology of princessdom. A type of self-infantilisation. Languid, docile, cherished, but ultimately placid, too ‘royal’ for work, only fit for the pleasures of the flesh. To put it simply, this is a princess of commodity, a princess of the consumer society.

The princessdom typology becomes cemented in the realm of perfumery purely from one fact alone: money. Perfume is an expensive interest—as expensive as hobbies and interests come. Even an interest in creating perfume is expensive. Raw materials such as Iso-E Super (probably the most recognisable material in the world) costs over £8 per 10g, whilst purer Absolutes can run over £300 for only 50g of raw materials. And of course, perfume itself is a great expense. Even smaller, nicher houses can run up to hundreds of pounds in price for 30 or 50ml of the product. It is an interest that can ultimately feel impossible to slice away from the vestiges of consumerism and phantasmic capitalism.

This triangulated formulation of desire sees the princess as an object of desire through this archetype representing a form of being that, ostensibly, was only historically available to the echelons of high-society. The realm of aristocracy, who paraded gardens and indulged in decadent meals without worry, without financial fear. It does in turn, try to create a sense of replicating a bubble of stability that is not achievable in the tangible world. It is a fantasy, a fantasy of a world that never really existed projected onto the body of the real. This psychoid phenomena translates the fantasies of princessdom—and by extension, femininity—into the olfactory lexicon of perfumery.

It is difficult to divest from the endlessly marketed images of idealised femininity. The purported ‘princess’ of perfume is one that ultimately coincides with certain fantasies of the feminine. As we stretch further into the realms of the unknown, as right-wing and fascist ideologies spread like a plague across the West and far beyond; it’s important to pay attention to the methods in which femininity, and feminine ideals, mutate and shift to fit the boundaries of political compasses. Is the princess of perfume, an image of languid docility, the image of royalty, the perfect picture of a consumable object, a way of divesting from these ideals, or falling right into the trap? Is reclaiming the feminine subject of the princess, an archetype that has spread far beyond the historic class barriers of royalty and prestige, a method of re-imagining the princess as a liberatory category that supersedes these historic barriers and ultimately nullifies them, thus reducing their autocratic power? Is the image of the princess, viewed in liberatory terms, a method of utilising Baudrillard’s conception of seduction—a game of utilising signs against themselves in order to achieve gendered liberation—forged in an understanding that these categories can and do possess the ability to liberate the body?

I do not have a direct answer, although, I am accordingly critical of reclaiming such categories that are themselves produced by conditions that aimed to separate the chosen ‘elites’ from everyone else. I have attempted to dissect and understand the methods in which archetypes can be both liberatory and entrapping; both tools of power divestment and tools of the authority. The methods in which the complicated matrices of liberation and control can often be contradictory in their output. But I suppose, above all, I’m critical of the titles. Titles that, ultimately, did not emancipate their original owners from such pan-cultural ideals as misogyny.

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M.P.S. Simpson
My name is Pascoe, and I'm a writer based in London who focuses on cultural criticism with specialisms in perfumery, erotica, literature and internet-based discourse and subcultures. I've been published in the US based magazine HALOSCOPE on similar topics, and I'm currently a writer for the London-based perfume brand Jouissance Parfums. 
@_femmedetta / website