Contemporary perfume advertising

In the second part of her analysis, our semiologist examined “the surpassing of religion and the affirmation of the sacred.” To this end, she studied photographs from advertisements, essentially photographs that promote perfumes by evoking certain phenomena such as ecstasy or contagion. We see this immediately on viewing the ads, which represent three women as “possessed” by the perfume advertised. In the first image entitled Hypnotic Poison, a name with symbolic significance, the movie star Milla Jovovich certainly attempts to bewitch the viewer through the spiralling movements of her arms, which recall the zigzag lines of the cloths in which Mary is wrapped in Poussin’s 1630-32 Assumption, but her omnipotence is only relative, since she herself is subject to a force she does not master. She may try to avoid a penetrating look, but just the same, her body is penetrated. The fact is that the cloud of perfume that envelops her, to the point of making her disappear, has a hypnotic power that extends out toward the viewer, who is a captive spectator, carried away by the perfume.   

The effect upon the female body of Opium proves even more apparent. We are in the presence of two reclining women; how could we possibly fail to associate this with the state of felicity or extreme drunkenness of the great mystics of the Christian tradition, which are so well portrayed in many artistic and literary works of past centuries? One woman is in a more than dreamlike state; she has obviously lost consciousness. Her wavy hair, in the foreground, has absorbed the spirals of the perfume’s scent. Another woman, in a highly erotic position, is in the process of enjoying the perfume as she enjoys herself, so to speak, and vice versa. In this representation of this woman, the force of the olfactory has clearly triumphed; the operation of fusion has attained its zenith, which could be said to be a seventh heaven. Since, concludes Maria Giulia Dondero, “woman is perfume”.

Metamorphosis of the sacred

In ancient religiosity the diffusion – by contagion – of a self-generated power was accomplished by the holy body itself, as we see with Poussin’s Virgin. However, things are different with the perfumes of Dior or Yves Saint-Laurent. In these cases female bodies receive, or even undergo the power of an entity that is other, and which penetrates and transforms them, reducing them to the condition of victims of transcendent forces. There is no possibility of controlling this invading power, which is a radical thrust towards sensibility and harmony with the environment. The ad shows a body in perfect condition among clouds of perfume.  Sinuous bodies are displayed that are perfectly in tune with the heady essence that escapes from the perfume bottles.

Sacrality finds itself metamorphosed, which signifies that it has undergone a “deranging”, in the etymological sense. At the end of her exploration of the relation existing between the representation of olfactory sensuousness and the dimensions of experiences that are as religious as they are relative to the sacred, often deeply embedded in modern and contemporary images, Maria Giulia Dondero offers her analysis, featuring an original sense of the concept of the “sacred”, shared, if truth be told, by other researchers, especially anthropologists and theoreticians of religion. It is a matter, she writes, of “a transcendent force that constructs the framework and the filter through which our lives have meaning [...], a force that reveals our impotence, our inability to determine ourselves.”