With a 40-year career in the fragrance industry, Annette Green has a lot of insight to share.
Her new memoir, “Spritzing to Success,” does just that by detailing the 94-year-old fragrance industry veteran’s experiences, challenges and accomplishments throughout her respected career.
“I’ve been retired for 15 years and the longer I was retired the more I realized that the story I had to tell was important,” she said. “It’s important from a nostalgic point of view for people in the industry and could be helpful for people entering the industry who don’t have a clue about the background of the fragrance industry.”
She documents the state of the fragrance business starting from the late Fifties when the industry was much smaller than it is today, with American women rarely wearing fragrances and looking at scent as a luxury for special occasions instead of everyday wear. At the same time, The Fragrance Foundation, which was founded to encourage U.S. consumers — particularly women — to wear fragrance, was on the verge of ceasing operations.
Green was contacted to take over The Fragrance Foundation pro bono as president in the hopes of saving it and saw an opportunity to increase consumer interest in fragrances due to the changing social and cultural climate of the early Sixties.
“We were at the cusp of women going to work and that was a turning point because it meant they were interested in dressing up every day and thought of fragrance as an accessory,” she said. “I created this idea of a wardrobe of fragrances and had seminars for the industry to explain that they should offer different types of fragrances, like fragrance for work, play, romance and sophisticated events.”
Green not only succeeded in convincing brands to start introducing new fragrances, but made The Fragrance Foundation into a source for educational, cultural and historical information about the fragrance industry. In 1973, she launched the annual Fragrance Foundation Awards, which is still one of the biggest industry events today, and in 1992 she expanded the awards internationally to France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the U.K.
“I was trying to get the industry to think of fragrance as an art form and to think of the perfumer and packaging designers as artists,” she continued. “To look at in that concept takes the consumer to a new level of appreciating fragrance.”
Net proceeds of the book will go to the Annette Green Fragrance Foundation Studio at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Annette Green Perfume Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. Green has always been an advocate of education opportunities within the beauty and fragrance industries, so it was important for her to give back to these initiatives.
On the current state of the fragrance industry, Green stated “I think it’s at a crossroads today where there’s still one foot in the past and one foot in the future. I hope that my book will solidify the past, so the industry doesn’t have to think about it and it can move into the world of technology and globalism and understand the changing preferences of the consumers.”
“Spritzing to Success” will be available for $29.99 starting Sept. 1 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the book’s site.
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