On Perfume | Halcyon

My fascination with perfume - or scents more generally - probably began in suburban teenagehood. My then girlfriend wore Smitty, and I proudly sported Blue Stratos (which trumped my second choice, Old Spice, and was streets ahead of Brut, "fashionable" at the time).

Fast forward the best part of 30 years and a family trip to the perfume museum in Grasse, where the fragrant air, even in the streets outside, and the fabulous design on show inside hooked me once again.

Next was picking up a copy of The Emperor of Scent and trying to understand the scientific processes behind the olfactory skills of Luca Turin.

In late 2016 came my first attempts at creating perfume myself, taught by the inspiring Sarah McCartney and her kind husband at 4160 Tuesdays.

4160

I share below some interesting, more recent, perfume-related insights that I've come across in my own research:

More and more people, it seems, are wearing fragrance. Perfume has shown double-digit growth since 2021, and now has retail sales of US$64.4bn globally, according to Barclays analysis. That is not far off 40% above its 2019 level.
Research led by the University of Edinburgh Business School explored what happens when scent is added to a virtual reality (VR) offering. It looked at how olfactory stimuli embedded within VR technology enhances an immersive experience. The team studied scenarios using a variety of both ambient (actual scents) and imagined (prompted through description) olfactory cues that were studied in the field, online and in laboratory settings. They found that when a scent that is compatible with the environment is added (for example, the scent of coffee in promoting a local café, or a peaty grassy scent in promoting travel to the Scottish Highlands), it makes the consumer feel more immersed in the experience, which increases positive responses towards the product. In short: olfactory cues heighten immersion which in turn elicits a peak experience (flow), which ultimately improves brand responses.
A bod y of work by the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid and colleagues revealed that there are some languages with rich olfactory lexica, especially within hunter-gatherer societies. The Jahai language, for example, has one single word ‘for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, leaf of gingerwort, wood of wild mango, among other odour sources’. Speakers of such languages are better than most at correctly and consistently identifying smells. A significant factor in explaining these cross-linguistic differences relates to lifestyle: if smells are very important within a community as they are key to information about food sources and dangers, say, then smells will be talked about more, noted Psyche.
The post-pandemic world witnessed a strong demand for prestige fragrances. "This category is booming in the US," according to Coty CEO Sue Nabi..."It's 60% above the pre-pandemic levels. And now, this fragrance index is globalizing. You can see it happening now in Europe and also in China. So this phenomenon behind fragrances is globalising."
Now we’re entering a greener age where sustainable resources are vital ingredients, noted the FT, ecology is the new luxury. In perfumery, a quiet revolution is taking place. Natural ingredients are gently capturing the zeitgeist and gaining traction over synthetic molecules that have dominated for decades.
A fragrance company in Switzerland tapped into its massive scent library to figure out whether some fragrances that smell nice to humans can repel malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Luca Turin was in Zurich in 2016 when a journalist asked him what he thought was a reasonable price for a perfume. He replied that the price of a dinner for two with a decent bottle of wine in a decent restaurant was about the upper limit, say $120 or so for 100 ml of Eau de Parfum (EdP) or a half ounce of proper extrait. While natural materials go up in price when there is more demand, Turin pointed out that formula cost in all but a handful of fragrances is less than 10% of sales price.
From Chanel No. 5’s secret recipe to the modern proliferation of DIY scents, the global perfume global industry has supply chains as delicate as the scents captured in its tiny bottles. Quartz analysed how perfume can adapt to a changing world.
It turns out that body image may also be influenced by sensory stimuli. Certain smells and sounds cause us to think of ourselves as lighter and thinner, while others make us feel thicker and heavier. In one of two experiments, participants were asked to adjust the dimensions of an onscreen 3D avatar so that it best represented themselves as they were exposed to fragrances. A lemon scent caused the subjects to dial in a lighter body weight. A vanilla odour had the opposite effect. In the second experiment, the study's authors had headphone-wearing participants walk in place on a wooden board as the researchers manipulated the sound of of their footsteps in the headphones, making them higher in pitch or lower. While walking, they were presented with lemon and vanilla scents, reported Big Think.
Our sense of smell is deeply connected to our emotions. Any scent can trigger a feeling. No wonder choosing a new perfume can be overwhelming. To streamline the process, L'Oréal went straight to the source of those emotions: the human brain. Working with neurotech provider EMOTIV, L'Oréal developed a new way for consumers to select fragrances. At flagship Yves Saint Laurent stores, customers put on an EEG headset that records electrical activity from all cortical lobes of the brain. A YSL consultant then guides them through various fragrance families, tracking their neural responses to different smells and narrowing in on the scent that's best suited to their emotions.
Japanese startups like Aromajoin and Scentee Machina have designed advanced scent diffusers that can generate hundreds of aroma permutations, are controllable remotely via app, and can deliver scents in a matter of seconds.
According to the Scent Marketing Institute, scent can affect everything from mental health, to spatial perception, to retail behaviors. Scent is also a powerful form of communication, with everything from our vehicles, to the food we eat, to our own bodies telling us something is amiss by emitting conspicuous odours.
The BBC reported on a team that aimed to preserve the smells of the past for the sake of cultural heritage.
What does biodiversity loss smell like? Italian supermarket Italmark offered customers a whiff with its home fragrance. Dubbed Extinction, the product takes its scent from flowers that grow on Monte Baldo in northern Italy. According to Italmark, more than 40% of all Italian alpine flora can be found on this mountain's slopes, including endemic species of flowers.
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