When perfume bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have perfume bottles

The airport in Oslo, Norway, will no longer sell bottles of L’Oreal’s Flowerbomb perfume in its duty free shop after a Norwegian passenger who was carrying a bottle of the perfume in her carry-on luggage was stopped by security officials at Beauvais airport, north of Paris. The perfume comes in a bottle that could easily be mistaken for a grenade if you were a blind idiot.

“The current regulations prohibit products in the shape of weapons and we think that this bottle could be used to scare passengers, just like a water gun could,” Oslo airport spokesman Jo Kobro told AFP, apparently with a straight face.

The lede from the AFP story is a wonderful moment in journalism. I love the writer’s phrasing as he or she grapples with some quick way to make sense of the entire thing:

“Flowerbomb, a perfume sold in a bottle the shape of a hand grenade, has been withdrawn from duty free shops at Oslo airport so that extremists will not be tempted to use it as a prop.”

Does this mean that the defintion of the word extremist has now been stretched to include the extremely fashionable? Or are we about to see a wave of street theater terrorists using perfume bottles and Nerf guns for props?

“I love the smell of Flowerbomb in the morning. Smells like … victory!”