erfume must be one of the hardest things to sell. I already like it, but which to buy? All I want is a perfume that smells exactly like a fresh, trembling tuberose but what I get is pictures of 11-year-old girls poncing around in evening gowns with velvet trains, women (who look as if they’re struggling with an eating disorder as well as a dirty great bit of kelp) writhing at the water’s edge, a young woman with feathers coming out of her bum wearing a leg leash, a man lurking around with a bunch of peonies, pictures of one naked person giving another one a fire-fighter’s lift, very many pictures of women looking wistfully air-headed surrounded by baskets of floristry and a whole lot of absolute crap written to describe a scent.

Magazines now carry perfume samples, and many American magazines carry up to three separate perfume samples as part of the full-page advertising. (In America you don’t need to buy perfume. You just slink up to a newsstand and rub yourself against page 57 of something.)

In Australia, they’re squabbling over hundreds of millions in sales of women’s perfumes in department stores, plus millions at chemists and in department stores for men’s fragrances. So they spend up on their launches of new scents. The perfume companies have monstrously lavish cocktail parties, dinners and parties with fireworks and caviar and obsequious waiters and lots of alcohol and free samples. They invite their closest personal friends: the Press.

After all, advertisers are flogging a wee bit of luxury for the people who can’t afford to get invited to the perfume launch parties with caviar and fireworks and marvellous old Oscar de la Thingie flown out from (gasp, swoon, stagger) Paris! A bit of romance and glamour in a beautiful bottle. And some of the bottles are very beautiful, delicate, mysterious, gloriously chunky, designed by surreal artists and marketing geniuses. Others push the point, with fake jewels and golden metal butterflies.

We’re buying Diamonds and Rubies, Trésor (Treasure) and Tweed, Lace, White Satin and White Linen that we can’t afford to buy or wear because we live in the real world where white linen is impractical. We’re buying the sexy, the forbidden, the racy, Volupté, Poison, Tabu, Joy and Opium. We want to be Knowing, Clandestine, Spellbound, Unforgettable, Beautiful, a Diva, a Paradox; to have Worth, Youth Dew, Mystery and Panache. We want to associate with a lifestyle, or smell of its old money. We want it for Eternity, Forever. Or at least until 4711. There are no perfumes called Pre-menstrual Bitchface or Sheer Poverty.