Help! Hilary Duff recently announced that she’s releasing her own perfume.

That might seem like just more commercial flotsam, yet another ton of garbage we can heap on our rotting mountain of spangly cultural detritus.

But, oh, this is worse. Think of it: Hillary Duff, teenaged-star of TV and the pop charts, has been carefully groomed to reach a fabulously lucrative market: tween (and now teen) girls. What Britney use to be (before she got into the serial marriage business) Hilary is even more so. She is a marketer’s dream.

Now, with her new perfume, Hilary is marketing…herself. Britney used to sell Pepsi. That was the old paradigm: manufactured pop idol sells consumer goods. But Hilary’s perfume is the cutting edge of the New Consumerism: manufactured pop idol sells her own image.

The image was created to sell, and now it’s turning around and selling itself. It’s a closed loop: a marketing tool that markets itself. Genius, really. And if the perfume isn’t enough for you, she also has her own line of clothes, called, appropriately, “Stuff by Hilary Duff.” There is always more stuff to buy.