How to lie with fragrances

Reviewing the way brands communicate fragrance (in the past 5 years) I learned a lot about how truth is relative and how to lie with the perfect smile. Because there is no other legislation than health and no authority to rule what is said officially about fragrances, as a brand you are free to tell and invent everything. When information is scarce (the secrecy), experts lack, advertising is good with press and there is no legislation … the freedom of speech allows you to tell almost whatever you want.
- press releases arrive to journalists and brands do not sign articles published in magazines. They are not so responsible of what is written to people and in an imaginary trial it would be hard to prove a "lie".
- natural raw materials presence. You have a 100% synthetic composition and you claim jasmine absolute, rose absolute, etc. It's perfectly legal. There is nothing to stop you telling that, other than ethic. People do not know how absolutes smell, a GC analysis is not cheap and who would do that? So, if the world is still so relaxed why not inventing? Perfumes is about dream and marketing about what people want to hear …. we are told that since many years. Increase the phenyl ethyl alcohol and damascones/damascenones and you will indeed feel a big rose! The illusion is perfect.
- natural raw materials origin. You have in your formula the cheapest Chinese jasmine but you claim Grasse absolute. No rules to stop you telling, and not so easy to analyse (you have to look for that difference to find it). So, why not becoming noble if everyone wants "prestige"?
- reformulations. The fragrance formula is the property of who produces it and the name is a trademark of a brand. If you reformulate a fragrance (price/regulations/market taste) you don't have to tell it to your consumers, so why bother to keep the same expensive/old perfume when you can twist it. With 400 new and coloured launches it's hard to keep in mind all the perfumes on the market and their personality/profile even if you wore that. So, why not to take advantage of this confusion? When customers are no more loyal to one fragrance, why should you be to them and not change Mitsouko?
- historical perfumes. There are few people left who smelled old fragrances, some of them don't even remember the smell. Why shouldn't we "invent" the history? The Cleopatra's fragrance with Hedione, the Napoleon cologne with Galaxolide. One can even invent an old formula: take an old paper from flea market, some ink and feather and write something … here you have a document found in convent in Italy with 30% Galaxolide! It will not go to Louvre or Sotheby's, so it can be "authentic". Ethic stopped to be a value of our times and again, nothing would stop acting like that. There are still a lot of very young perfumers who do not remember when Galaxolide/Hedione HC/Lilial were discovered, so, why shouldn't we put them in a "formula" from 1910?
- research. In the past there was a lot of research work from big fragrance houses (IFF, Givaudan, Firmenich, etc) that was not published or not available to public (the "secrecy" and the difficulty to protect that work). So, as a brand, why not inventing a research? It could be secret, exclusive and you may find all the reasons to justify the lack of details! Instead of paying a lab to do a real fragrance research … it's not so difficult to claim it because nothing would stop you! You can invent a trip in a jungle, a photo album of the research team, some unheard plant extracts and molecules that do not exist … a nice script for a Spielberg movie. You can even co-distil rose+jasmin+osmanthus and present to people a very rare "pink orchid" absolute that inspired the fragrance. Because you do not publish in a scientific magazine you can fake the reality. There was quite a number of scientists who faked science (read the article were Luca Turin revealed the fraud in neurobiology in France) … so, why not a fragrance (that is completely inoffensive)?
In art "faking the truth/reality" is a form of expression associated with post modernism. In the industry it can be a way to make a lot of money when there is nothing to stop it.
Losing faith and credibility is a major problem that brands will face in the next 5 years.