Celebrity fragrances: We put the season's newest and hottest scents to the test

By Davida Hogan on December 1, 2011 in

Editors Notes

There's no doubt about it, celebrity fragrances are big business. In fact, a recent online search for celebrity scents turned up 154 different products at one retailer alone. This makes sense, of course, since fans strive to emulate their celebrity idols. We think we know everything about our favorite stars, from what they like to wear, to where they vacation and who they date. But could we determine what scents they like? We decided to put our sniffers to the test.

Armed with nine of this season's top-selling celebrity perfumes, as predicted by Patti Kapla from FragranceNet.com (a big online perfume retailer), we conducted a blind in-office smell test. Staffers were challenged with matching the celebrity to their fragrance. The results: identifying a celebrity based on scent is hard!

Testers wanted to like their favorite celeb's perfume but it often smelled nothing like what they expected. Perhaps because fragrance is such a personal choice, it's hard to decipher what a fragrance will smell like based on a star's public persona. On average, test participants could only identify two celebrity scents correctly. Taylor Swift and Heidi Klum's fragrances were the easiest for testers to decipher; Jennifer Lopez was the trickiest. Jennifer Anniston's fragrance was the most polarizing. One tester praised it, saying "it smells like jasmine. My mom would love it." While another bluntly stated "it smells like a man."

What did we learn? Most testers selected Taylor Swift's fragrance as the one to give to a teen girl; Jessica Simpson's perfume was the one they'd buy for themselves or a girlfriend. And, if you're in the market for a gift for mom, our research shows Heidi Klum's scent would make a good one.