Gayil Nalls to Lead an Olfactory Meditation

We’ve interviewed Gayil Nalls and noted the first two installments of her Olfactory Inkblot series. Now there’s a third:

On Saturday, January 8th, 2011 at 4:00 pm an olfactory meditation on the World Olfactory Social Sculpture World Sensorium will be led by artist Gayil Nalls.

Sounds cool. Details here. The venue itself—the Main Hall of Staten Island’s historic Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden—is also a draw. Plus it’s free!

Celebuscents: Is Paris Played Out?

In our look at Parlux Fragrances, Inc., we noted that the majority of its gross sales come from the company’s Paris Hilton brand perfumes. Thus its commercial fortunes are tied to her continued draw as a celebrity. The relevant question for investors becomes: How good are her prospects?

Lacking a crystal ball, we turned to Google Trends, a data source we’ve used before in analyzing public interest in fragrance over time. 

We entered “Paris Hilton” as our search term and Google produced a Search Volume Index—a weekly data series from January 4, 2004 to the present. The results are scaled by setting the January, 2004 level of search traffic to 1.0. Episodes of heavy search volume appear as peaks on the resulting graph. We collapsed the data to monthly intervals for easier viewing.

The high levels of interest (A) in early 2004 correspond to the launch of her TV series The Simple Life in December, 2003 and the release around that time of her sex video with Rick Salomon. The big spike (B) in February, 2005 matches her hosting of SNL and the hacking of her Sidekick. Her August, 2006 arrest for DUI (C) didn’t have much impact on her Google traffic, but her suspended license bust in January 2007 gave it a kick (D). The last big spike in interest (E) was June, 2007, when Hilton did jail time for violating her parole from the driving charges. The last episode of TSL aired in August, 2007 (F), and Google search interest in Paris Hilton has never been the same—it’s been downhill ever since. Her August, 2010 coke bust in Las Vegas (G) barely moved the needle.

The long term trend is clear: Paris Hilton’s Web celebrity is dwindling.

More alarming are the search volume results for “Paris Hilton + perfume”. We see the expected seasonality with huge peaks preceding each Christmas shopping period. However, Christmas search volume peaked in 2007 and has declined each year since. So Can Can (launched October, 2007) generated a lot of interest but Fairy Dust (October, 2008) didn't rise to that standard. Nor did the mid-year launches of Siren (July, 2009) and Tease (June, 2010) get the same attention during the crucial Christmas sales period.

The Google Trends for Paris Hilton don’t seem to be working in favor of Parlux Fragrances. The company has hitched its wagon to a fading star, and mid-year launches have not helped matters. Perhaps word of mouth and print advertising are keeping sales high, but based on these numbers the Paris Hilton perfume brand is looking played out.

NASA braggarts walk it back

No questions, please, we’re scientists.

Just two weeks after a news conference breathlessly announcing a new, arsenic-based bacterial life form, NASA scientists have begun backing down from their “extravagant, textbook-changing claims.” Color us not too damned surprised.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, perhaps feeling burned by having run with a New York Times hook-line-and-sinker story on NASA’s claim, has staff writer Faye Flam take a suitably squinty-eyed look at government-funded scientists Felisa Wolfe-Simon and Ronald Oremland.

When criticism of their work appeared shortly after their presser, neither author deigned to take questions from the press or public about obvious soft spots in their claim. Yesterday, however, Wolfe-Simon released a statement “making a more modest claim.” And speaking at a panel discussion at the American Geophysical Union, Oremland, doing his best Claude Rains imitation, pronounced himself shocked, shocked at the overheated press accounts of their work:

He [Oremland] was baffled when asked why so many reporters used the word thrived to describe the bacteria’s state in concentrated arsenic. 

However, as Faye Flam points out, 

The word can be traced back to Wolfe-Simon at the news conference. “Not only did these microbes cope, but they grew and thrived,” she said, “and that was amazing.”

Baffling indeed.

Faye Flam also did some, uh, actual reporting and came up with a couple of nuggets.

The fact that the microbes can survive in concentrated arsenic is nothing new. In 1997, scientists published a paper in Nature Biotechnology showing they could grow E. coli in even more concentrated arsenic than Wolfe-Simon used . . .

Uh oh . . .

[Other scientists] balked at NASA’s insinuation that until Wolfe- Simon set them straight, they were stuck on the assumption that life elsewhere must use the exact same biochemistry as life here. Not only do biologists assume different chemistries are possible, they’ve already created some alternative forms of DNA - molecules dubbed PNA and TNA for example - that can also carry a genetic code.

Hmmm . . . so what’s left of all the hoopla? Well, NASA isn’t talking.

Members of the team were not available for additional comment Thursday. A NASA spokesman said it wasn’t part of the agency’s mission to evaluate peer-reviewed findings. “We funded it and by our charter when we have news, we have to release it to the public,” said Dwayne Brown of NASA. “Our role was to tell the public about this finding, and that’s what we did in the news conference.”

Dwayne Brown is a public servant paid with our tax dollars. Feel free to put your questions and comments to him directly.

Finally, more attention should be paid to the quality control at Science magazine which served up this steaming pile of half-baked research. Bloggers (Carl Zimmer) and reporters (Faye Flam) quickly found skeptical researchers willing to critique the paper—how come the editors at Science could not? Or if they did, why didn’t they listen to them?

Celebuscents: A peek behind the press release

We haven’t watched much TV at FirstNerve Manor since that meteorite took out the aerial on the north belfry back in ’02. So excuse us if we are not totally up to the minute on Jordin Sparks’ claim to celebrity status based on a show called American Idol. That’s why we just yawned when she announced the launch of her celebuscent in October.

What did grab our attention was last Thursday’s press release noting that her perfume, Because of You, had snared a 2010 WWD Beauty Biz Award for “Best Executed Launch Strategy.” The award-winning strategy was to go out at a $9.50 retail (2.5 oz.) exclusively at the Dots clothing chain through November, then rise to $14.95 while expanding to a broader distribution.

An award after two months on the market? That makes us want to know who’s behind Because of You. According to the press release it’s an outfit called Apra International LLC.

Apra is a leading fragrance company known for creating high-quality, affordably priced celebrity/designer fragrances. By introducing up and coming celebrity fragrances at affordable prices, Apra plans to carve out a piece of mass market fragrance sales by giving its consumer base something that the other leading market fragrance companies cannot offer due to their competitor’s inefficient cost structure.

A leading fragrance company? Uh . . . just one we’ve never heard of until now. Apra International LLC googles mostly to Jordin Sparks press releases.Then we figured this might be something to go on:

“We are honored to receive this award for the launch of our first celebrity fragrance endeavor and thank Jordin Sparks for making this amazing partnership possible”, says Ezriel Polatsek, CEO of Apra.

Unlike Apra International, Ezriel Polatsek googles quite well. In fact, he’s been in WWD before, on June 18, 2008:

Estée Lauder, Clinique File Suit Against Preferred Fragrance

The Estée Lauder Cos. Inc. and Clinique Laboratories Inc. have filed a lawsuit against Preferred Fragrance Inc. alleging trademark infringement in connection with alleged knockoffs of Lauder-branded fragrances.

The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court on June 11, also alleges unfair competition, false advertising and dilution. Other named defendants include Preferred’s owner, Izriel Polatsek, also known as Ezriel Polatsek; CVS Inc.; CVS Pharmacy Inc. and CVS Caremark Corp.; Family Dollar Stores Inc., and John Does 1-10.

The lawsuit said that Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Preferred is a “known infringer that previously has copied — and previously has been sued for its copying of — famous perfume brands.” It said the Brooklyn firm appropriated Lauder’s marks for its own use for its line of knockoff products that it has begun selling or soon will sell for the holiday 2008 season in stores such as CVS and Family Dollar.

Previously sued for copyright infringement? That would seem to refer to Elizabeth Arden Inc v. Preferred Fragrance Inc, filed June 17, 2005 in the Southern District of Ohio.

In fact, suing Preferred Fragrance Inc. seems to be the in thing: Ed Hardy’s people filed a Federal complaint against them last February.

A rare non-press release Google hit for Apra International LLC provides an address in upstate New York. Google-map the address and it turns out to be the same as that of—wait for it—Preferred Fragrance Inc.

So let’s see if we have this straight: as owner of Preferred Fragrance Inc., Ezriel Polatsek has pissed off Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden and Ed Hardy; as CEO of Apra International LLC, he is given an award and PR bonanza by fashion industry journal WWD.

If you think this all smells a bit odd, we’re inclined to agree.

ISDP: Minimalist Edition

We’d like to think it has something to do with the spirit of the season, but more likely than not it’s temperature related. Here we are on the thirteenth of December and there’s only a single item to offer the morbid fan-base of ISDP. And even then, it’s really a borderline call—one of those instances where someone takes it upon himself to check on a person he hasn’t heard from in a while, only to discover the inevitable olfactory clue. Still, it’s all we’ve got: a 60-year old man found in his apartment on the 500 block of Royal Street in New Orleans:

a friend of the deceased stated that he had not seen him for several days and decided to go visit him. Upon arriving at his apartment he discovered his door closed, but with a foul smell emanating from the apartment. The police was then notified and Eighth District Officers responded to the scene and found the body of the deceased in a state of decomposition.