Fragrances The War of the Noses

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The race is on and will heat up as the holiday buying season approaches. The early advantage seems to go to Escape. "It's a killer," says Allen Burke of Dayton Hudson stores. "A runaway hit." But the three giants are most concerned with long-term sales and permanent market niches. That takes a big budget and intelligent strategy, which is more than what's behind many minor scents, including most celebrity and designer fragrances.

The vessel that holds the fragrance obsesses designers. In the '20s, Coco Chanel cut hers from crystal in a severe, geometric shape, setting the standard for power bottles. At the time it spelled freedom and modernity to women, and it is still immediately identifiable. Now companies look for a mixture of old-fashioned quality and contemporary flair. Klein's pristine tube for Escape began in his mind as an appurtenance in an English travel case. Arden headed down to the rhinestone mines. For SpellBound, Lauder added a detachable atomizer, achieving a sort of nostalgic novelty. "Success is like a one-armed bandit," observes Pierre Dinand, a French designer who has created more than 300 perfume bottles, including those for SpellBound and Escape. "To succeed, you need to have a row of cherries. If you have four cherries and one banana, it's a flop."

Each of the new elixirs sells for about $200 an ounce (with the lighter eau de toilette costing substantially less). The marketing truism is that perfume is an affordable luxury; the woman who can't afford a Chanel suit can buy the fragrance. But if romance is on the rise now, so is frugality. Says marketing consultant Carol Colman: "Consumers might question cutting off something for the kids in order to buy a bottle of perfume, when there are three or four on the dresser already."

But those three or four are just what the industry is counting on. One 1980s legacy that no one is rejecting is the rise in popularity of a wardrobe of scents -- one for the office, another for evening, still others to match season or mood. Brand loyalty is virtually a thing of the past. In another trend, women are using men's scents increasingly, especially Armani, Calvin Klein's Eternity, Chanel's Egoiste and Guerlain's classic Vetiver.

The perfume business today is a contest between commercial calculation and customer whim, with the marketers growing ever more sophisticated. But there are still a few wild cards in the poker game. This fall will also see the launch of Omar Sharif's signature scent for women, which will come in at $750 an ounce. For this whopping sum the customer gets a Baccarat crystal flacon and two refills a year for her life -- or the perfume's. Who knows? Four cherries and a banana? Or maybe a five-cherry row.