Tis the Season

The woman is incredibly beautiful in that slightly undernourished way which implies that she'd probably sleep with you for an éclair.  Her make up is flawless and her clothing is the epitome of style and class while still being revealing enough to give the impression that for two pins (or that éclair) she would grab you and sexually ravish you on the spot with all the frenetic activity of an octopus on amphetamines.  She stares glassy eyed into the middle distance while homage is paid.

Or possibly its a man, indescribably handsome with a jaw that isn't just chiselled, its been chiselled, planed and lacquered.  You could perform surgery with that jaw.  He's wearing an expensive suit or possibly the sort of casual peasant clothes whose price could keep the rural economy of a decent sized country humming for a year.  He is striding masterfully towards something or standing masterfully in the middle of something.  Whatever it is he's doing you can be sure he's doing it masterfully.

The scene is a reception or a mansion or some piece of particularly photogenic out of doors.  Appealing music plays while a voice over (usually but not exclusively female) in tones of hushed disinterest delivers a collection of words which individually have meaning and collectively are garbage.

They have names like "Chrysalis", "Placenta" or possibly "Ketamine".  Words heavy with meaning in a context where meaning itself is irrelevant.

Yes, its perfume advertisement time.  They're all pretty much the same and they're all desperately trying to imply that this is the sort of lifestyle you can have if you splash their particular brand of smelly water over yourself.  Television channels are currently overwhelmed with an endless, and largely interchangeable, collection of perfume advertisements.

I honestly don't know why they bother.  There is one simple reason why such advertisements are thick on the ground at the moment.  Perfume/aftershave is the number one choice of purchase when you are morally obliged to buy someone a Christmas present but want to give exactly zero fucks when it comes to considering what it should be.  Rarely seen nephews, irritating female cousins, elderly relatives of both sexes you thought were safely dead until your mother reminded you of their existence and the fact that they would be expecting a present.  This is the market for perfumes and aftershaves.

If they were being honest perfume manufacturers would simply say something like, "If you were going to buy them anything else you would have already got it so just grab a bottle of Giorgio Armani's "Excrescence" for men and have done with it.  You know that's all they're getting you."  In fact once people cotton on to the fact that they can simply regift all of the bottles of perfume they received last year and give them back to the people who bought them in the first place the entire perfume industry is going to collapse.

For the rest of us here's a fun mental game.  Count up the number of bottles of perfume/aftershave you received and who you received them from.  It will be  a handy indicator of how many of your friends and family actually like you.