Research Information System
History of Retailing and Consumption, 2026 (Scopus)
This article analyzes how European perfumes circulated in the late Ottoman Empire through retail mediation. It argues that the ‘democratization’ of scent was not a simple effect of lower prices but a negotiated outcome of marketing at the point of sale, across uneven infrastructures, local olfactory traditions, gendered norms, and unequal consumer knowledge. Using consular reports, trade journals, archival correspondence, advertisements, and material evidence, it shows that misleading marketing was structural: labels were altered, sacred or imperial imagery added, brand names mimicked, bottles reused, and ‘Paris’ invoked to manufacture value and sustain hierarchies of refinement and modernity. Under weak trademark enforcement and information asymmetry, markets operated through graded equivalence rather than strict authenticity. Imitation and substitution, finally, reflected both opportunism and broad demand for affordable equivalents, revealing active consumers and retailers in shaping global goods’ meanings.