‘Your Perfume Smells Like Your Daddy’s Got Money’: The Paris Hilton Story

Stop the world, I want to get off: it turns out Paris Hilton actually markets an astoundingly popular perfume called “Heiress.” It is for women everywhere who want to make men stop and say, “Excuse me, miss, I know it’s not funny / but your perfume smells like your daddy’s got money.”

Speaking of Hamilton, did you hear that it’s going on tour? As Vulture put it, now you can not get tickets in Chicago too! As well as San Francisco, LA, and other lucky cities.

Back to Hilton, though. She has turned herself into a captain of industry, as the Broadly profile makes clear.

she has opened 50 “Paris Hilton” stores in over 40 countries; licensed her name and brand to 17 product lines; opened a resort, the Paris Hilton Beach Club at Azure in Manila, Philippines (construction is nearly completed on a second hotel in the Philippines); created Paris Hilton Junior, a clothing line for children, with Genesi Srl; launched a cosmetics line with Pearl World in China; performed three Foam & Diamonds summer DJ residencies at Amnesia, the Ibiza nightclub; and disrupted the rules of American celebrity years before Facebook, Uber, and a zillion other startups disrupted technology. …

Paris idolizes businessmen like her great-grandfather Conrad Hilton. To run her day-to-day operations, she employs a full-time office in Beverly Hills, but Donald J. Loftus, the president of Parlux, the company that releases Paris’s fragrances, says Paris helps design her fragrances’ bottles, choose the scents, and plan the marketing campaigns. “She is the hardest-working person,” he says. Paris estimates that only Elizabeth Taylor has sold more celebrity-branded perfume than she has. (She will probably eventually break Taylor’s record, since the actress is dead.)

The closest I have ever come to understanding fragrance is reading Tom Robbins’ enjoyably bizarre immortality epic Jitterbug Perfume. The closest I’ve ever come to understanding Paris Hilton is watching her cameo on “The O.C.” I’m beginning to think these things are linked. If I got perfume, as a concept and as a worthwhile thing on spend money on, would I get Paris Hilton?

Still, I don’t have to find Hilton fathomable to respect her. She is savvy and successful, upfront about who she is and what she wants, and she makes things happen. In a lot of ways, she’s sort of the poster child for Third-Wave / Lipstick Feminism. In other ways, of course, not so much: feminists would probably be more eager to embrace her sans drugs and DUIs and were she to actually vote instead of merely urging others to.

But, like, she really works this messed up system of ours:

Paris knew how to manipulate her femininity for business opportunities. By breaking the Upper East Side’s dated Edith Wharton rules about heiresses’ behavior, Paris became the protagonist of the local tabloids. Everyone was talking about her, so everyone wanted her at their parties. Party promoters even started asking the sisters if they could pay them to show up, making them among the first people to receive a paycheck for going out.

Also, Broadly reveals, she adopted a goat when she was a child and managed to hide it from her dad. That’s commitment.