Every one of my loyal Celebitchy readers (I like to pretend I have a fan club) knows there’s nothing I hate more than celebrities “designing” products – or what used to be called endorsing things. The endorsement idea never bothered me. What annoys the crap out of me is that some marketing guy came along and said, “You know, it sounds better if we say you actually came up with the idea yourself.” Which is totally true – and genius on his part.

However I loathe being expected to believe that Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez were spending a bunch of time in a French lab working on finding the right combination of perfume notes so it would smell just so.

Next up is Christina Aguilera’s latest olfactory foray – “Inspire” perfume. If it’s based on her attire, it has top notes of early midlife crisis, middle notes of transsexual hookers, and base notes of desperation.

Here’s Christina at Macy’s Herald Square yesterday. Apparently it was their biggest perfume launch ever. Images thanks to WENN.

Mimi was in New York yesterday to launch her perfume, “M.” The singer who can break glass with her high notes showed up at Macy’s to a crowd all wanting to catch a glimpse of the diva. For $130 the fans received a bottle of her perfume and the honor of being in the presence of Mariah. But if you were willing to shell out $300 you were allowed to take a photo with Mimi in the vicinity.

Mariah Carey introduced her new perfume at Macy’s in New York yesterday, and the stench of divaliciousness was thick in the air. TMZ was on the scene where fans were stacked eight and nine deep to catch a whiff of Mimi, who arrived in a Rolls-Royce droptop, with the kind of police presence normally reserved for heads of state.

[TMZ]

If you got to close to the her you were told to back away. Dear Lord, don’t touch “The Mariah!” An “absolutely no hugs” rule was spelled out to each of the fans. The purple bottle with a butterfly that contained the scents of Moroccan incense, Tahitian flower and toasted marshmallows. I kinda thought it would smell like strippers and fear. Also, if you can recall the feud between Puff Daddy and Mariah we’ll soon have a winner. At the end of September Diddy challenged all women to crank out a scent that was better than his. Mini retorted with some quips about Diddy basically being a male slut.

“I heard about this competition, and I wish Puff all the best with his new fragrance, but I think we’re actually appealing to different types of women. M by Mariah Carey is about being unforgettable, not unforgivable. It’s not about a ménage á trois or a one night stand, it’s for the woman who wants the man to fall in love with her immediately, stay in love, and treat her like royalty.” – Mariah

Mariah Carey is shown at the launch of “M by Mariah Carey” at Macy’s Herald Square in NY on 10/23/07. Thanks to PRPhotos.

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.