Please name some popular female celebrities that we gossip about regularly who don’t either have fragrances or represent a fragrance. I know that the only one I can think of offhand is Lohan, and that’s a good thing because she looks she would smell smoky and old beyond her years like her voice. It seems like just about everyone has a perfume or advertises one. In just the past week there have been stories about fragrances by Sarah Jessica Parker, Gwen Stefani, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and The Beckhams. Here’s a list of celebrity perfumes from Wikipedia, and although it’s long I bet it’s not complete.

The appeal of celebrity fragrances is perplexing to me because I’m not particularly fond of perfume. I associate it with people getting in my olfactory space when I’m on an elevator or in another closed area. When I did wear perfume I stuck to one brand, Angel, and was loyal to it for a few years. There must be a decent demand for celebrity scents or else there wouldn’t be so many of them, although the market seems like it’s saturated at this point. Do any of you have more than one perfume that you use regularly and do you try new perfumes? I do that with makeup, but the scent thing just never caught on with me.

According to an August, 2006 AP article, the celebrity perfume market is the fastest-growing segment of the fragrance industry, but it’s definitely getting overcrowded:

But some experts warn the market is heading for saturation as increasingly unlikely celebrities latch onto the trend.

“There is a kind of exacerbation of the phenomenon right now which makes me think we are not far from the breaking point,” said Marie-Claude Sicard, a Paris-based expert in brand analysis and strategy.

The craze for celebrity scents is credited with reviving a dormant fragrance industry and bringing a whole new customer base of under-40s to perfume counters.

Celebrity and celebrity-endorsed brands represented 23 percent of the top 100 women’s fragrances in the United States in 2005, up from 10 percent in 2003, according to NPD Group data.

Offerings in the pipeline include scents from New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, teen queen Hilary Duff and singer Mariah Carey.

[AP article found on MSNBC]

The article says that there’s a lot of criticism that the perfumes smell the same and just have different names attached to them. Maybe the boyfriends of celebrity fragrance-wearers can close their eyes and pretend they’re getting with the airbrushed woman on the bottle of the perfume in the medicine cabinet. Guys usually don’t need much assistance in that department.

Anyway here is Beyonce in a silly-looking strapless blue dress with a big ‘ol bow and too-light shiny pantyhose launching Emporio Armani Diamonds yesterday. You think they would hire a decent stylist for her.

And here’s the video for the commercial:

Thanks to PRPhotos for these pictures.