The scents we live with, and the places we find them

This week: the home is becoming fragrance’s busiest address. A tomato scent that began as a candle is now by the kitchen sink. Sol de Janeiro has brought its body mists into the living room, while a laundry brand has made the journey in the other direction, onto skin. Even the dog has been given a bottle of its own.

Meanwhile, perfume’s language is becoming wonderfully specific. Gourmand shows no sign of slowing — banoffee in Loewe’s home range, banana arriving on skin about as fast as it arrived in the kitchen — and perfumers are asking us to imagine kitten fur, wet concrete and pool water. These are objects, rooms and memories rather than ingredients, and they feel far more personal than a conventional list of flowers and woods.

In this edition of diffusion: what’s worth knowing now, new places to discover perfume beyond the usual counters, objects for the home, and a busy few days for anyone who wants to experience fragrance in person.

The fragrance stories worth knowing this week →

Where fragrance is happening in London (and beyond) →

Three niche perfume retailers have opened their doors beyond the usual central London department-store counters: the Sainte Cellier studio in Ladbroke Grove, Dot Perfume Gallery in Windsor, and Fraegra — The Fragrance Shop’s niche concept — in Manchester.

Each offers another way to discover perfume in person, and together, they suggest a wider map for niche fragrance retail: neighbourhoods and towns beyond the familiar central London counters.

Maison Diptyque’s home-candle workshop covers scent pairings, accessories and candle care at 107 New Bond Street. Several dates to choose from, starting this Saturday 26 September. The £63 ticket is redeemable in store on the day.

Molton Brown’s Covent Garden masterclass puts Re-charge Black Pepper and Fiery Pink Pepper side by side: two ways to wear spice as the weather turns. There are drinks and sweet treats, and the £10 ticket can be redeemed against a purchase of £50 or more at the event.

YOUGI’s Wimbledon Quarter drop-in lets you blend essential oils into a 15ml perfume to take home. It takes around 10–15 minutes, so this is one you can fit around the rest of your Saturday. Registration is free; pay £15 if you make a rollerball. Places are first come, first served.

Fragrance writer Alice du Parcq joins Amanda Carr, founder of Barnes Fragrance Fair, to discuss her forthcoming book The Philosophy of Perfume.

ScentExpo brings independent perfume houses and oud specialists together on Percy Street for two days.

At Westfield Stratford City, Givenchy’s L’Interdit Elixir pop-up is outside Boots on the lower ground floor until 27 September.

At Westfield London in White City, Valentino Beauty’s Vendetta installation is in the North Atrium, also until 27 September, with sampling, campaign film and photo moments.

The Olfactive Feast pairs a four-course Eastern European dinner with fragrance experiences and a decant bar at ZIMA Soho.

What we’re reaching for now →

Three different ways to stylishly scent your home and not a reed in sight! Santa Maria Novella has made a £60 scented terracotta pomegranate that sits on its own little plate. L’Artisan Parfumeur’s £220 Amber Boule releases fragrance from crystals inside carved terracotta. Ginori 1735 offers a £120 scented stone and oil to sit inside one of its porcelain diffuser holders.

Santa Maria Novella · L’Artisan Parfumeur · Ginori 1735

Historian Will Tullett’s Sniff: A History of Smells is out now in hardback, £25. It travels from medieval churches to modern cinemas, asking what the smells of a place can tell us about the people who lived there.

Yale Books

The ideas changing how we think about fragrance →

In 2020, tomato arrived as a candle in a glass vessel at £59. You put it where it would be seen and lit it when people came over. You might’ve mentioned where it was from.

This summer it turned up by the kitchen sink. Malin + Goetz added tomato hand soap and hand salve to the range; both sit on its UK site now beside the candle and room spray, the soap at £18. You’ll be buying it again in a few weeks.

Loewe has its own tomato trail: Tomato Leaves candles and room spray sit alongside a £62 liquid soap. Elsewhere in its home collection, pistachio and black sesame are joined by its banoffee candle. Ingredients we might expect to find in the kitchen are becoming the smells we choose for the rooms around it.

Jo Malone London meanwhile, has moved onto the dog. Orange & Cedarwood dog shampoo, made with WildWash, £18, and fronted by Tom Hardy and his French Bulldog, Blue. Each bottle illustrated with one of four dog breeds.

The purchases that shape a home’s smell are increasingly the things used again and again. The candle was a statement about taste. The soap — and now the dog — is just what the house smells like.

How scent lives on skin and in memory →

Pick up a bottle and read the back. Somewhere in the list will be a word doing a job that has very little to do with a raw ingredient.

Amber, for one, has never come from fossilised amber. It is an accord built from materials including labdanum, benzoin and vanilla, and it has been sold that way since long before anyone reading this was born.

The newer fantasies are simply more specific. Nostos lists kitten fur between jasmine sambac and warm milk in Calico, while another of its fragrances builds an impression from wet concrete and cold metal. Vacation has created a pool-water and swimsuit fabric accord. Faux Rose draws on satin sheets and Italian sponge cake. CBCB perfumer Christopher Bull has worked with latex and metal, and in an interview with Dazed, describes how he would build the smell of wet concrete.

The kitten fur idea has company. As Polyester recently noticed, Diffractive Studio has Black Cat, and Demeter has been selling a fragrance called Kitten Fur since 2017. The desire is older than this particular crop of perfumes: to keep something familiar close, even when you are away from it.

These are not declarations of ingredients. They are instructions for what to imagine.

A note list has always asked the person reading it to complete the perfume. What has changed is the scale of the imagined world: from amber, leather or an ocean to one object, one texture or one afternoon.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde has Dorian study perfumes for the moods they stir: