Nowadays perfumes are not designed just separately for men or for women only.  The businessmen design perfumes for couples as a kind of advertising trick to attract people’s attention.  In the advertisement of these perfumes, they want to express different kinds of feeling in relationships between lovers in order to make people willing to buy their products.  The two ads of Gucci’s perfume, ENVY, and Burberry’s perfume, touch, are quite prominent because instead of showing the interaction between lovers, they hide the men’s reaction parts and focus on the women’s parts, which suggests that in modern relationship between two genders, women are no longer the one who stay in passive position.  They are now trying to be active in gender relationships.

In the ads for Gucci’s perfume, ENVY, the background is brightly colored while the tow bottles of the perfume are in a dark shadow.  It’s unusual to darken the products in an advertisement, but it is amazing that when the background is colorful, the black part becomes outstanding.  In this case, we even do not know which bottle is for men and which one is for women because they are so dark that we cannot see the words on them.  Opposed to the dark bottles, the man and woman are both naked, and their position and body language have sexual implications.  While the woman is shown kissing and touching the man, the man seems to be completely passive, his face unseen and his arms stretched backwards. 

back

In the ads for Burberry’s perfume, touch, first we can see that the background is black and white while the two bottles of perfumes are colorful.  This kind of technique is often used in an advertisement in order to make the products stand out.  The shape of the bottles are created like men and women’s body shape that men’s body shape is more like an up side down trapezium while women’s is more like a trapezium.  The two bottles can be put together to become a parallelogram which suggests that by being together, they become more harmonious and balanced.  In the background picture, we can only see the woman’s face, but not the man’s.  The woman seems to be eager to touch the man and quite enjoy smelling him, but the man’s reactions cannot be seen.  Is the man also showing his enjoyment in their relationship on his face or is he holding another woman in the other side?  The feeling could be totally different because of the man’s reaction.  The suit the man wears makes him more mysterious and foregrounds the touch of the woman’s hand and the bottles of the perfume in the bottom.  The love feeling between this man and woman is so slight, vague, and abstract that we cannot see the interaction between them directly.  Her touch on the man’s shoulder is so gently that she only touches the clothes, but not touch directly the man’s body.

back

first, the Gucci ad is quite passionate and gives sexual implication 

while the Burberry ad focuses on the subtle feeling between man and

woman.  Second, the Gucci one has a colorful background, but the

Burberry one has a black and white one.  Third, in the Gucci one,

almost the whole body of the woman is touching the man while in the

Burberry one, only the woman’s hand is touching the man.  There are

also similarities between these two ads.  The most obvious one is that 

in both ads, the men’s faces are hidden and the reactions of them are

not shown.  The women’s hands in both pictures seem to be

emphasized and put in the middle part.  In these two ads, we can see

an untraditional gender relationship that women become the one who

is more active while men, who traditionally are the decision-makers,

become more passive.  This kind of exchange of the roles in gender

relationship is also shown in modern society.  Women are

encouraged to be more active and independent, just like how they are

shown in the two ads.

back