Christmas is coming, along with an inevitable deluge of adverts.

It seems my post of yesterday, Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn, was mildly prophetic. After enjoying weeks of glorious sunshine, normal Scottish October service has now resumed. Cue a dreich, rainy day in which I got soaked on the way home from work, to ballet, and back from ballet.

We've started rehearsing for the Christmas show (before Hallowe'en!) and that got me thinking about Christmas. Christmas, of course, means the launch of seasonal adverts especially designed to sell you stuff you don't really need. 

And the worst culprit of them all? Perfume adverts.

I saw today that Brad Pitt is going to be advertising Chanel No. 5. Seriously? Honestly? And he gets £4m  to do it? I had to watch a sponsors video before I could even watch the teaser clip. Adverts for adverts? Brad Pitt advertising a woman's scent? This is a new low even for perfumery.

I hate perfume adverts. They bring out an unpleasant, vitriolic side of me who yells at the TV when I see a woman in a red cloak chasing a wolf or something equally fatuous.

I cannot even think of a caption. The idiocy of this picture speaks for itself.

Every year when Chanel, or Lancome, or whoever, launch a new campaign I just want vomit, but most especially their celebrity "featurette" ones, like Nicole Kidman pretending to be an actress who wanted to be a dancer. What? Huh? Who cares?

They don't describe the product, they don't tell you anything unique about the product. They simply peddle in the equally fleeting assets of beauty and popularity to associate their brand with an aspirational ideal of a lifestyle, which buying their product will in no way entitle you to or provide you with.

Obviously I see why they can’t sell the product in an advert. Describing a smell is not going to get you anywhere. I also see why they have to advertise. If they didn’t there would be no brand awareness of their particular perfume, and their sales would reduce. As long as a perfume industry exists, it makes good business sense to advertise.

It’s just they're so vapid, and vacuous, and unrelated to a smell. To me they epitomise everything about the fashion and beauty industry I absolutely hate. They’re linking their perfume to an ideal of beauty and a lifestyle that has no relation to what you will receive when you purchase the product.

This is not going to happen to you if you buy this perfume.

Andrew thinks it’s funny when I watch television at Christmas time and launch into a tirade about how buying a perfume isn't going to give me a giant, long gold neck, or let me wade through liquid gold, or enable me to dance through a field of meadows in a negligee or render me suddenly appealing to Brad Pitt.

I’m sorry I can’t be more cogent. It’s just perfume adverts. I hate them.