Perfume
Essays

Perfume sits at the intersection of sensory science, consumer behavior, marketing, and cultural studies, making it a surprisingly versatile academic subject. Students encounter it across business, psychology, communications, and humanities courses. What makes it intellectually interesting is the way scent connects to identity, emotion, and social signaling — matters that resist simple quantification and invite analysis from multiple disciplines. Works like The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr bring scientific and narrative dimensions to the subject, while luxury industry cases, such as those involving LVMH's diversification strategy into luxury goods, situate perfume within high-stakes business strategy.

The papers archived here reflect a genuinely wide range of approaches. Business-oriented essays examine marketing communications for new perfume brands, conduct case studies on companies like Flare Fragrances, and analyze corporate strategies at firms like Avon Products. Other papers take a psychological angle, exploring how self-perception and self-image shape consumer fragrance choices, or examining claims that wearing too much perfume may be linked to depression. Literary and rhetorical approaches also appear, with some essays drawing on works like The Great Gatsby or analyzing appeals — ethical, emotional, and logical — as they apply to scent-related arguments.

A strong essay on perfume benefits from a clearly scoped thesis that commits to one lens — marketing, psychology, culture, or science — rather than trying to cover all of them at once. Evidence drawn from case studies, consumer research, or close textual analysis tends to carry the most weight. The most common pitfall is treating scent as merely decorative subject matter; the strongest work takes seriously how deeply smell intersects with identity, commerce, and human experience.