FT Blog: do you Believe it’s Britney?

We received a press release last night about Britney Spears‘ new perfume. The note pretty much consisted of the following statement from the company behind the scent, Elizabeth Arden and a copy of this publicity picture.

“We recently shot Britney Spears for the print campaign for her new fragrance Britney Spears Believe, in Santa Monica. It is true that Britney did leave the set; however, she returned after a brief time. Cayli was the wardrobe assistant on the shoot. We used her as a stand in so that we could set up the lighting while Britney was off the set. When Britney returned, we shot the national print ad with her. The only person in the national print ad for Britney’s Believe fragrance is Britney Spears.”

To be honest, we hadn’t heard of Britney storming out of that photo shoot (other ones yes; that one, no) or those stand-in rumours until we received the email - so it strikes us very much of “the cosmetics company doth protest too much”.

If it is really Britney as they claim, someone has done a helluva lot of Photoshop work on it - or by “recently” they mean they did the photo shoot about four years ago. The girl in the picture doesn’t really look like Britney now - she looks dead eyed, with non-Britney-ish hair and without any personality to her face.