Narrative Perfumes: Every Sniff Tells a Story, Don’t It?

There’s an emerging trend in the world of personal fragrance, and this one has nothing to do with smelling pleasant or celebrity endorsement. Rather, Narrative Perfumes, as the moniker implies, attempt to tell a story through aromatic blends which smell like a specific time, place, or experience.

It’s all part of the “lightning hot” trend of scent marketing, says global fragrance expert Marian Bendeth, owner of the Toronto-based Sixth Scents. “They’re appealing to people who don’t want to smell like a teenager. If it’s exclusive, hard to find, if it’s different, they want it.”

Bond No. 9’s collection aims to recreate the experience of a stroll through the various neighborhoods of New York, from Wall Street (sea kale, cucumber, lavender, ambergris, vetiver) to Coney Island (margarita mix, melon guava, cinnamon, chocolate, caramel, vanilla, cedarwood). Soldat Inconnu (”Unknown Soldier”), a sort of post-traumatic stress trigger in a bottle, attempts to replicate the smell of the battlefield. By Killian’s scent Les Liaisons Dangereuses is redolent of “bodies slick with sweat, hot with odors of sexual favors,” while the Gothic perfumers at Black Phoenix Alchemy offer a line of literary character fragrances which includes such intriguing scents as a incense/jasmine/moss-blend to represent the Alice in Wonderland’s Caterpillar and Sleepy Hollow, described as “the butchest, manliest of musks covered in well-worn leather.”

Of course, any endorphin branded™ nostalgic trigger scent is all in the nose of the beholder and, as with broader applications of scent marketing, individual consumer response to each narrative perfume formula is bound to vary. Perfumers Etat Libre d’Orange’s controversial Magnifiques Secretions–which combines such conventional essenses as sandalwood and coconut with such decidedly unconventional ones as blood, sweat, saliva, and sperm–caused one Londoner to become so “traumatized” when it conjured up distant memories of a car accident that she “…couldn’t get it off me fast enough.”