Fragrance houses know how to bottle scents – that’s their job and expertise. But scent is not only for wearing. It can also market products, create ambience or add realism to a museum exhibit. Emma Jackson reports from Ottawa and Julian Ryall reports from Tokyo
Perfumers and their companies are increasingly providing environmental scents for places such as museums and theme parks, to provoke an atmosphere or to recreate long lost smells, although progress is slow.
“The market is growing, but it’s taking much longer than people expected,” says Harold Vogt, founder of the US-based Scent Marketing Institute. Vogt says museums and theme parks present a new revenue opportunity for perfumeries, but they must be willing to work with smaller attractions before hooking major contracts. “If you don’t support them now, they won’t come to you when they’re bigger,” he explains.
And some of the world’s big attractions draw so many thousands of visitors, they require tonnes of scent. Disney theme parks already use scents to make their attractions more realistic: a musty-scented haunted house, or the smell of cinnamon in the corny It’s A Small World attraction. More gruesomely, Thorpe Park in the UK recently hosted a contest to gather the UK’s smelliest urine to add realism to its Saw horror ride.
So despite the obvious market here, maybe it is not a huge surprise that fragrance houses are nervous about promoting these speciality environmental scents next to their world famous bottled perfumes. Indeed it is often hard to figure out who is making them.
“Everybody’s doing it, everybody’s trying something, but nobody wants to talk about it. A perfume house would not advertise that they’re making dinosaur dung,” Vogt laughs.
One major company, New York-based International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), developer of some of the world’s most famous scents – including Clinique Happy, Ralph Lauren Polo and Calvin Klein Eternity – has made some inroads.
“IFF has done a pretty good job. They have a couple of perfumers from their ranks who are doing extracurricular things like museum exhibits,” Vogt says.
One such perfumer is world renowned scent connoisseur Christophe Laudamiel, who works increasingly with museums, art galleries and other cultural attractions. In May 2009 he launched his scent opera, Green Aria, at the Guggenheim in New York, a sensory performance featuring only music and 23 specially created scents, sprayed into the theatre via small ‘scent microphones’.
He also created scent sculptures for the 2008 World Economic Forum, and has even developed a bottled fragrance for (and inspired by) the UK’s Kew botanical gardens.
Laudamiel says some of his scents are becoming commercially popular: “There are people contacting me saying they would love to experience those scents in different, other ways, like in the air for their homes or for their office,” but large fragrance companies in general are not yet involved in such projects. Vogt says he is encouraging perfume companies to take these opportunities as they have been proven successes for the few companies who have tried it.
A good example of this can be found in Japan. Encouraged by the popularity of an exhibition that included the scent of Cleopatra’s boudoir, Japan’s Kanebo Cosmetics is planning two new events that will similarly stimulate visitors’ sense of smell.
Kanebo’s fragrance research laboratory has prepared two scents that were released into display areas at the exhibition – titled Egypt’s Sunken Treasures – which was held at the Pacifico Yokohama convention centre between June and late September last year.
Based on many of the artifacts recovered from the Mediterranean Sea in a recent excavation project, a portion of the exhibition was also dedicated to Cleopatra – much admired among Japanese women for her legendary attention to her looks.
Kanebo prepared two scents for the exhibition. The first was Kyphi, a religious incense used in Ancient Egypt, while the second was Scent of Cleopatra, a composition of flower ingredients that she is recorded as having adored.
“At the exhibition, the area where visitors could experience the fragrances were one of the main points of attraction, with dozens of visitors queuing in front of each fragrance,” says Shinji Yamada, a spokesman for Kanebo. “This experience through smell rounded off and deepened the overall impression as it appealed to the visitor on a totally different level as the sense of smell connects to the brain differently to all the other senses.”
Kanebo first used scent in exhibitions and displays in 2005 at the Aichi World Expo, recreating the fragrance of the baobab tree.
The project was led by Ryoichi Komaki, who oversees fragrance development at the company, and the company believes it is unique in recreating unique fragrances, creating new ones and providing the technical cooperation to deliver them at public events. “We are not aware of any similar cases elsewhere,” says Yamada. “There are examples where conventional fragrances are dispersed in the air, but this is on a very different scientific level.”
As well as providing the custom blended fragrances for the exhibition, Kanebo also provided technical cooperation to ensure that appropriate amounts of the scents were released at displays. Kanebo says the response was so positive – the number of visitors to the exhibition far surpassed the organisers’ expectations – that the cosmetics manufacturer is planning to step up its cooperation in multi-sensory events, an area where other Japanese companies have been slow to take advantage of the opportunities.
Komaki is enthusiastic about a planned scientific exhibition that will again require fragrances to be released in the exhibition space, a Tokyo museum, and the creation of an original perfume to mark the occasion. “These collaborations do have a positive PR effect as they raise awareness of our unique fragrance research and thereby contribute to the company’s image,” says Yamada.
