Scent and surrealism: why perfumers are indulging in the imaginary
In fragrance, the line between the literal and the abstract is often blurred, but few fragrances exist that don’t have at least a faint tether to reality: a note you recognise, or an aroma you can relate to. But this autumn’s most intriguing new launches are those that aim to pull us away from the reassuring comfort of familiarity.
For its latest venture, Diptyque, a brand that has long created olfactory odes to the natural world, asked a collective of renowned perfumers to dream up fragrances for nature’s scentless flora and fauna. A brief this conceptual must surely be the dream for a nose – creative constraints often abound when producing for the fashion industry’s fragrance arm – but for Les Essences de Diptyque, each perfumer was given carte blanche to imagine the aroma of a certain facet of the natural world, from coral reefs to mother of pearl.
“I have always loved abstract themes because they give you a lot of freedom in your creation,” says Alexandra Carlin, the perfumer behind Corail Oscuro, which attributes a scent to coral. “Coral doesn’t have a scent, but it does have an atmosphere, colour and form, all of which nourishes a vision.” In the scent, her aim was to “translate the duality between the light of the water surface and the intense red colour of the coral.”
Eschewing the obvious was a priority for Carlin in creating the olfactory signature of coral: a predictable aquatic scent this is not. Instead, she considered its fragility, communicating this through a blend of sparkling bergamot, mandarin and pink pepper that gives way to velvety Indian rose, peppery ambrette seeds and a curious leek extract that enhances the salinity. The result is something as cold and delicate as bone china, with a slight mineral saltiness that steers the scent firmly away from girlish territory.
Francis Kurkdjian is another nose turning his focus to fantasy this season. His latest project for Dior, the Esprit de Parfum collection, reinvents five house scents in a concentrated new guise, with the iconic Gris Dior as the centrepiece. “This was a tricky one as it’s such an abstract scent: when you smell (the original), you can’t define what is inside,” he told Bazaar ahead of the launch. Indeed, this ode to Christian Dior’s signature colour is as addictive as it is mysterious: a chypre incomparable to any other.
Last year, D.S & Durga set the trend rolling with a fragrance that aimed to bottle up the scent of a rainbow, not by falling back on a fresh-air accord, but by blending ingredients that represent every colour in the spectrum. The result is genuinely odd but brilliantly addictive: a conversation-starter, not a crowd-divider. Similarly, Bibbi Parfum’s Ghost of Tom intends to conjure the scent of the supernatural. As green as it is woody, with a dash of fruitiness thrown in, you'll struggle to place it in a box.
For someone who chooses their fragrance based on nostalgia or comfort – perhaps cosy cashmere reminds you of a loved one, or jammy fruits take you straight back to teenhood – these unique accords will be hard to place. The scent-memory connection is strong, and most of us will have a reference stored away for the likes of rose, citrus or musk, meaning we’re likely to have preconceptions before trying a new perfume. But when a fragrance is free of familiar fruits and flowers, it can be experienced without expectations – and perhaps that’s exactly how the best signature scents are discovered.
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