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“Flowerbomb, a perfume sold in a bottle the shape of a hand grenade, has been withdrawn from duty free shops at Oslo airport so that extremists will not be tempted to use it as a prop.”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!”
September 12, 2006 at 9:45 pm
[...] I expect this means NYC will now join Oslo in banning L’Oreal’s Flowerbomb perfume bottles. I repeat, how drunk do you have to be to think this is a handgrenade? [...]
November 10, 2007 at 9:35 pm
[...] jewelry case. It would be the perfect home for two items previously documented here at CD. L’Oreal’s Flowerbomb perfume which was taken to be a terrorist threat at the Oslo airport and these oil lamps — just the thing to brighten up the [...]