Vault Index
Sources catalog
People
Concepts
Keyword glossary
Keyword Definition Count communicative-anosmia Leleń’s term: the structural condition of perfume advertising in which the viewer cannot perceive the product’s defining property 2 palimpsestic-narrative Narrative structures layering multiple literary/mythic/cinematic traditions simultaneously 1 fragrance-marketing The advertising and promotional practices of the perfume industry 3 narrative-immersion Engineering viewer absorption in a storyworld as a compensatory strategy for communicative anosmia 2 synesthetic-effects Cross-sensory sign operations in which one sense modality is evoked through another 2 multimodal-semiotics Sign-systems that operate across image, sound, and verbal text simultaneously (Kress) 2 gender-myth Barthes-derived: the naturalization of constructed gender norms into “false obviousness” 2 representation Hall’s theory: meaning produced through systems of correspondences linking concepts and signs 2 heteronormativity The ideological assumption that heterosexuality is natural and normative 2 whiteness The racial coding of perfume advertising, in which white protagonists dominate (95% in Deng/Shi sample) 2 male-gaze Mulvey’s concept: the structuring of visual pleasure around a male spectating subject 2 symptomatic-reading Althusserian method: reading what a text cannot say — its absences and problem domains — as diagnostic 2 myth-analysis Barthes’s method for decoding the naturalization of ideology into apparent common sense 2
Research threads
Thread 1: The Structural Impossibility of Scent Advertising
Concepts: Communicative Anosmia
Sources: Communicative Anosmia and Poetics of Storytelling in Perfume Commercials , The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials
The genre’s defining formal and ideological problem. Both sources converge on the idea that because scent cannot be transmitted, the ad substitutes narrative — but they disagree on whether that narrative is primarily craft or primarily ideology.
Thread 2: Gender and Representation in Fragrance Marketing
Concepts: Gender Myth in Perfume Advertising
Sources: The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials , Communicative Anosmia and Poetics of Storytelling in Perfume Commercials
The genre’s representational politics. Contested on the Kenzo World problem: does formal subversion of erotic convention constitute ideological escape?
Thread 3: Dior as Case Study (research thread, not yet compiled)
Both sources analyze the same Dior commercials (Miss Dior/Portman; J’adore/Theron) from opposed methodological positions — Leleń on narrative craft and literary allusion, Deng & Shi on ideology and symptomatic reading. A compare-and-contrast essay structure is built into the vault.
Candidates for compile loop
Open questions
Are there sources on perfume advertising outside the Western/Eurocentric frame? Both current sources assume a Western industry.
What’s the relationship between communicative anosmia and other “impossible media” problems (e.g., advertising taste, texture)?
Is Kenzo World (Jonze/Qualley) a genuine counter-example to the gender myth thesis, or does it remain captured by it?
Does gender-neutral fragrance marketing (CK One and successors) change the representational logic, or reproduce it?
How does the predominantly female consumer base of perfume interact with Mulvey’s assumption of a male spectating subject?
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