I get my issue of Bon Appetit this month and it stunk like a women’s magazine. Sure enough, there is an ad for Calvin Klein Euphoria. I tore it out, but the magazine stinks.
What dumbass thought this was a good idea to make a cooking magazine smell like a perfume counter?
Considering the state of the magazine business, only a dumbass would turn down a paying advertiser. Those scented inserts bring in big revenue.
Those things are almost as bad as the harpy who menaces you with a perfume sprayer when you are walking through a department store. They are not uncommon in the Sunday newspaper here, but it is easy to simply avoid the tainted sections (usually other ads…).
I remember back in the '90s you could call customer service (“subscription services”?) for a magazine and get put on a list to receive only fragrance-free copies. Today, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Yes, indeed. Hard for them to resist such ads…and $cents.
I hate them.
All of our magazine subscriptions are fragrance-free. Haven’t had any problems.
Cologne ads kill my appetite like roadkill. Short sighted gain but it damages their brand.
I agree. I was reading an article in that issue. The smell was so irritating that I didn’t even bother to try to find the insert and extract it, but instead just read something else. For some reason the smell was indeed more offensive when reading about food than in some other lifestyle mag.
Exactly. You are subconsciously imagining the flavors and smells of a dish when you read a food mag. A weird non-food smell short circuits that enjoyment. I would challenge the editors to read a recipe while standing next to some burning tires and see how it effects their impression of the dish.