The owner of a Russian perfume company has apologised for selling a fragrance called “Sexual Harassment”.
Nimere Parfums, a small firm which has been selling eccentrically named perfumes such as “Gypsy Blood”, “Courtesan Intrigues”, and “Windsor’s Temptation” since 2015, released Sexual Harassment last year.
But now Nikolay Eremin, who runs the company, has admitted he made a mistake in giving the fragrance such a provocative name.
Writing on Instagram, Mr Eremin said although he had not intended the name to mean literal harassment, it was still wrong and “not thought out”.
“My mistake was that at that moment I did not think about the real victims, about the people who really faced this tragedy,” he wrote.
He was only thinking about his own “creative freedom” and “ego”, Mr Eremin added in his mea culpa online. “Yes, creativity should be free, but only if it doesn’t hurt anyone.”
Mr Eremin said the backlash over the perfume’s controversial name prompted him to look into the statistics of how many women suffer from harassment and had realised “how wrong I was”.
Lots of people who had experienced assault and abuse had contacted him to tell him their stories, he said in a later Facebook post.
In response, he pointed his followers towards an app designed for victim of domestic violence.
Rather than quietly removing the perfume from sales to avoid embarrassment, Mr Eremin said he wanted to “loudly” apologise for his mistake and ask forgiveness from anyone hurt by his decision.
But for fans of the fragrance he had good news: the smell would soon be released under a new, less inflammatory, name.
