One of my favorite things that my friend, The Non-Blonde, does on her website is a monthly series called “Currently” in which she does a brief round-up of various personal things in the area of books, music, television shows, cooking, or random thoughts. I look forward to each month’s entry, particularly to see what she’s reading or listening to (’80s music forever!) or because I’ll know that I’ll smile at one of her random thoughts. (“Why are there gummy bears in the soda of Candy Crush soda?” or “Please tell me that the Oscars are a Kanye-free zone.”)
So, with full credit to her for her wonderful idea, I’d like to do something similar, though with a few differences. First, because it’s me, I’ll never manage to have any entries that are just one sentence long. Second, I don’t have time to read books any more, alas, but I do read a lot of things around the web, so I would like to share instead articles or sites that have caught my interest lately. So, here’s March’s Grab Bag.
General Perfume News:
- From The New York Times: “Designing a Bespoke Perfume” and the general cost thereof. Interesting tidbit: in the 1970s, roughly 90 fragrances were launched a year. Today, according to Michael Edwards in other work, more than 1,600 fragrances are released each year.
- From The Smithsonian Magazine: two allegedly fake pheromones submitted by a perfume company for study back in 1991 caused scientists decades of wasted research into human pheromones.
- From UPI: A Nielsen report states that American Latinos have become a key consumer in beauty (and fragrance) sales, showing a “staggering” difference in their purchases as compared to how low sales are in those areas for other demographic groups. One quote: “The Nielsen report also indicated Latino men take their beauty and appearance very seriously. Compared to non-Hispanic men, sales on shaving cream, hair spray, mustache dyes and after-shave all grew significantly, especially when it comes to fragrance as sales increased by 15.5 percent.“