Aftershave & Perfume Images
Creative Images for Luxury Products
How do you advertise something whose primary characteristic is smell? Aftershave and perfume photography has to find ways of representing the product pictorially and making it look attractive. Sometimes this is partly down to using shape of the bottle. The design might be unique, such as the “Killer Queen” jewel shaped perfume bottle further down the page. In which case, it is clearly meant to be a key part of the product’s appeal. So, we photograph it in a way that shows it off. Or, perhaps we can put some of the ingredients next to the bottle to hint at what is in it. Often, however, advertising images for both aftershave and perfume turn to more abstract approaches and become works of art. This may be linked to a lifestyle using associated symbolic elements.
Aftershave Photography
The image above is a conceptual advertising image of Boss Infinite aftershave. The product itself is blue, so I wanted to bring some more blue tones into the image, but with added warmth. The seascape gives a feeling of going on forever, disappearing at the horizon into infinity. To keep the composition very minimalist, I used a long exposure to smooth out the water as I felt the detail of waves would interfere with the simplicity of the scene. The sunrise/sunset theme picks up on the times when we are most likely to put on the aftershave – before going to work or going out in the evening.
The Davidoff image above uses a very different approach. It is mostly geometric, with the pattern of triangles lit up on the background. The blue echoes the aftershave itself and gives a cool feel. The presentation within the 2 successive frames gives us a “heroic” feel – the bottle is the centre of attention, on a pedestal demanding that we look at it.
From warm to cool colours, real water to a CGI ocean, splashes to fake window light, there are many creative ways of displaying your product. Before deciding on how we’re going to present the bottle, we will explore the story you want to tell and how we can best get that across to your potential customers.
Perfume Photography
The same kinds of principles apply to perfume photography as they did to images of aftershave. We want something that is interesting, perhaps artistic or maybe suggesting an aspirational lifestyle. Perfume images tend to be a little more feminine in their choice of colour and feel because we are dealing with products aimed at women.
There is the danger of falling into stereotypes with perfume advertising images. We don’t want to completely pigeonhole people, but on the other hand we need to use symbols that are in some sense typical in order to communicate.
The Valentines themed background for the Killer Queen perfume photo below was created using CGI.
Finally, we can choose to do the whole thing in CGI. The Chanel bottle below and the blue silk background were modelled using Blender CGI software. This has the advantage that once the bottle has been modelled it can easily be put into a wide range of different 3D scenes. You can see some of the other images I created with the 3D model of this bottle in my post on CGI perfume images.
