Hitting the Bottle: OsMoz Shorts

OsMoz, the blogging arm of fragrance and flavors firm Firmenich, has unveiled a series of whimsical videos exploring three common perfume-oriented issues: feeling naked without scent, feeling invisible without scent, and feeling drunker without scent. Yep -- turns out there's a fragrance version of drunk dialing, but the results aren't any prettier than when you're sobbing snot tears into your ex's answering machine, begging to get back together. In a short entitled “The Reflect”, a disheveled a-ha-looking guy surveys the detritus of his bachelor pad: empty wine glasses, heaving ash trays, far too much black leather furniture, appearing understandably dismayed. Despairing, he picks up a decanter of what is either Advocaat or human bile, and attempts to chug the whole thing in one go. Like the bummy Lost Weekend dipso he is, a-ha guy spills half of it down his undershirt, and stumbles into the bathroom to fish the back-up bottle of Baileys from its hiding place in the toilet cistern. He gets distracted by the lipstick kiss print on the mirror, flashing back to his previous evening's tranny-romp-for-one, fueled by too many White Russians and the John Cameron Mitchell film festival on cable. Hmm -- Revlon's Cherries in the Snow really does skew blue-red, a-ha guy muses as he studies the lipstick smudge. Momentarily cheered, he spritzes on a dash of Jessica Simpson Fancy, and that's when things really start to get weird. He suddenly does a horror-movie morph into Michael Douglas from Wall Street, smugly pops his collar and struts out into the world, greased hair in place. He's moisturized his situation, preserved his sexy, assembled his shit. And then the horror-show kicker: it's all in his head. We see him wandering out the front door, looking dazed, still in his Advocaat/bile undershirt, holding a briefcase like he's not really sure what it's for. As the door closes behind him on his pigsty of an apartment, we want to scream, “No! Nobody's expecting you at your pretend job! Take a mental health day! Order in some pizza -- and a maid -- and for the love of tiny kittens and all that is holy, reassess your life.” Message: Just because you smell better doesn't mean you are better. Jesus, “The Reflect” is practically a PSA! Moving on from a pathetic perfume drunk to a fun perfume drunk, it's instructive to revisit the peerless Charles Bronson in his masterful commercial for Mandom: Message: All the world loves a lover...of Mandom. At least I think I understood those messages....

8 comments:

  1. I think the movie might exaggerate just a tiny bit...

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  2. Mandom is awesome! Thank you for that.

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  3. Gosh, they just don't morph like they used to...

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  4. I thought it was fresh lime juice.

    And I'm awarding you 1000 points for working in a Hedwig reference.

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  5. Yeah, I agree, that's a very strange little "Buy fragrance so that you can forget your crummy wardrobe, cruddy condo and regrettable one night stands" sales pitch.

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  6. Haha, queen cupcake - they've had to downscale morphing for the recession.

    But Brian, fresh lime juice wouldn't be opaque! Whatever he was drinking looked like buttermilk mixed with pus.

    Nathan, the Osmoz short that resonated with me was the lady who felt naked without perfume.

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