Olfiction

A Unique Fragrance House

Ford unveils fragrance for all-electric Mach-E GT

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Olfiction perfumer Pia Long was commissioned by Ford to create a fragrance to celebrate the launch of the new all-electric Mustang Mach-E GT, for those who “hold a fondness for the evocative smells of traditional petrol cars”.

The Mach-Eau fragrance was created by Olfiction perfumer Pia Long, with ingredients that each add a specific element of the scent’s story. Ford revealed the fragrance this weekend at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, an annual event that attracts petrolheads from across the globe. The scent, which is not available to buy, is part of Ford’s ongoing mission to help dispel myths around electric cars and convince traditional car enthusiasts of the potential of electric vehicles.

Pia’s starting point was to look into the chemicals that are emitted from car interiors, engines and petrol. This included benzaldehyde, which is an almond-like scent given off by car interiors, and para-cresol which is key in creating the rubbery scent of tyres. There were blended with ingredients like blue ginger, lavender, geranium and sandalwood that added metallic, smoky and further rubbery accents, as well as an overdose of Timut pepper, utilising the petrol-like topnote. An ‘animal’ element was also included, to create an impression of horses and underline the Mustang heritage.

In a Ford-commissioned survey, one in five drivers said the smell of petrol is what they’d miss most when swapping to an electric vehicle, with almost 70 per cent claiming they would miss the smell of petrol to some degree. Petrol also ranked as a more popular scent than both wine and cheese, and almost identically to the smell of new books.

The new scent is designed to help usher these drivers into the future of driving through their sense of smell. Rather than just smelling like petrol though, Mach-Eau is designed to please the nose of any wearer; a high-end fragrance that fuses smoky accords, aspects of rubber and even an ‘animal’ element to give a nod to the Mustang heritage.

Ford Mach-Eau perfume activation at Goodwood Festival of Speed. Photograph by Christopher Ison ©

“Judging by our survey findings, the sensory appeal of petrol cars is still something drivers are reluctant to give up. The Mach Eau fragrance is designed to give them a hint of that fuel-fragrance they still crave. It should linger long enough for the GT’s performance to make any other doubts vaporise too.”

                                                           Jay Ward, director, Ford of Europe Product Communications

Zoologist Chipmunk launches in August 2021

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Olfiction Creative Perfumer Pia Long has worked with Victor Wong of Zoologist to bring a new cute animal to the collection: Chipmunk! The perfume features oak absolute, spices and a green hazelnut accord (not a typical gourmand, more as you would find in nature).

This is what Victor has to say:

The lush green of the treetops fades to a dull gold. What seems a peaceful transition actually raises a blaring alarm to the creatures below. Time is running out. But for generations, mighty oaks have fulfilled a promise to provide, and leaves are not the only bounty tumbling to the forest floor. Chipmunks scurry among the detritus in their quest to collect the plumpest acorns. They eagerly gather what they can and, cheeks bulging with nuts, scamper home to line their snug burrows before falling leaves give way to biting snow.⁣
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Zoologist Chipmunk captures an autumn forest bursting with ripe nuts. Juicy quince, dusted with cardamom and nutmeg, dangles tantalizingly among naturalistic woods and green, milky kernels. Chipmunk invites you up into the branches, offering a dazzling vantage point from which to enjoy the rich golden and russet hues of the changing seasons.⁣
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TOP⁣
Quince, Pink Pepper, Red Mandarin, Cardamom, Nutmeg⁣
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HEART⁣
Camomile, Hazelnut, Fir Balsam Absolute, Oak Absolute, Earthy Notes⁣
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BASE⁣
Cedarwood, Amyris, Patchouli, Vetiver, Benzoin Resin, Opoponax, Guaiacwood, Animal Notes⁣

Chipmunk will launch in August 2021 and samples are already in circulation.

Olfiction launches Boujee Bougies

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Last week saw the launch of Boujee Bougies, a collection of five scented candles we’ve created as a perfumery playground and Olfiction’s brand debut.

The collection includes Queen Jam, inspired by a Finnish conserve, Gilt, a golden confessional, Cuir Culture, like leather in a library, Succulent, an ode to juicy cacti, and Hellflower, a sulphuric grapefruit-magnolia.

A collaborative full team effort to create, with perfumery by Pia Long, creative direction by Nick Gilbert, words by Thomas Dunckley, and illustrations by assistant and trainee perfumer, Ezra-Lloyd Jackson. We’ve worked with our clients (and friends!) at Parks London Ltd to bring these to life, and of course the fragrance oils are supplied by our partner Accords et Parfums.

Discover the brand and our playful fragrances at
www.boujeebougies.com

Perfumery education: a discussion with Christophe Laudamiel, Marianne Martin & Nicola Pozzani

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Christophe Laudamiel and his manifesto on education for all
Christophe Laudamiel’s passionate manifesto for rethinking perfumery education is a key theme in all his presentations about the topic – he now thinks there is more potential for his vision to become reality

How do you become a perfumer? What are perfumes made of? Who creates perfumes and how? What does real lavender oil smell like? What is “cashmere wood?” …hundreds of questions and thoughts that float around in the minds of consumers and those interested in our trade – yet we still lack a framework of academic level education that other arts have, much less real public access to genuine, accurate information. It is emerging – from various sources simultaneously – but how is a layperson to know what is true, what is twisted, and what is complete nonsense?

The perfumery educators

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the general public had access to real information about perfumery? This is a driving force behind what we do at Olfiction when we participate in communication about our trade, and this was the major theme in Christophe Laudamiel’s manifesto, written years ahead of its time. In fact, one of the reasons I called Christophe a “Perfumer of the Future” in my profile of him for Perfumer & Flavorist in 2017, is the tendency of his to be several steps ahead of the possibilities our trade is yet to explore; and the vision he has of what the world could be like if perfumery truly would be accepted as a legitimate art form, instead of considered just commerce. What better person to invite for an open discussion on the topic of perfumery education – and this is just what we did at the British Society of Perfumers. Marianne Martin (current vice president, BSP), and Nicola Pozzani (bespoke perfumer at Floris, and a scent art lecturer), joined Christophe for an evening of relaxed but passionate discussion on what kind of education is available now, and what would be ideal in the future.

Follow the BSP on Instagram

The event was recorded, and should it become available to the general public, I will edit this post to link to it from here. Members of the BSP will be able to access the audio recording in the members’ area of the website soon.

Some big themes from the night:

  • Current perfumery education is focused on serving commercial needs of the trade – preparing future perfumers to enter the trade.
  • Other arts have education for its own sake; to learn how to create and use the chosen medium without immediately and/or exclusively diving into how to create consumer products
  • Everyone should be able to fully participate in exploring their sense of smell, with some benefits beyond the obvious. Nicola Pozzani called perfumery education a form of therapy. His teaching often focuses on how to use fragrance as an aid to creation in other modalities.
  • As a higher education lecturer, Marianne Martin has the ability to see that even if students from an academic course would not go on to become perfumers or even work in the trade, “perfumery education would be an education for life.”

What could we do to improve perfumery education? And education for all; not just those wishing to enter the trade. It’s obvious that the general public are already being “educated” – by fear marketers; misinformed sales people and social media personalities with no deep knowledge about the topic. And what would happen if more consumers demanded quality from their fragrances in the sense of “not just another copy”; or honesty about marketing (so many brands still using tired tropes or outright lying).

What would it look like if we could engage millions of people with their sense of smell more? And give access to information and inspiration for life – an enhanced form of being present, observing, enjoying life.

Next BSP virtual perfumer panel

The next BSP virtual event is also a perfumer panel – this time, professional noses from multiple regions (USA, UK, India, and Greece) discuss their route to career, what they get up to in their role on a daily basis, and their perfumery process. The discussion is due to take place at 2pm BST

Scenting Christmas at the (Snow) Globe

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This Christmas, world renowned performing arts venue, cultural attraction and education centre Shakespeare’s Globe will show Christmas at the (Snow) Globe. As part of their dedication to making performance accessible, the production will have an audio described performance with a set touch tour for visually impaired visitors. To enhance this aspect of the production, Shakespeare’s Globe commissioned Olfiction to create fragrances which evoke all of the sensations and scents of Christmas.

The team at Olfiction created accords of Snow, Christmas Tree, and Pomanders as well as a finished fragrance which combines all of these elements.

Talking about the experience, Olfiction Perfumer, Pia Long, said:

“A Finnish person being asked to make the smell of a Nordic Christmas? Absolutely!
The challenge of doing things that are very well known by people is harder than it seems, because if you don’t get it right, it is as though you have ruined something that is personally important to them. It’s a fun challenge to make something that if you give the scent to someone, they will smell it and say ‘that’s Christmas!’.
I particularly enjoyed making snow because it is so abstract, more like a sensation than a smell – and it’s not until you think about it that you realise there is a smell. I’ve always felt that some aldehydes smelled like snow. That was the most fun to do as a perfumer – it’s something that you know and you don’t, because it isn’t as though there is a snow essential oil!”

Snow Globe

A sensation of cold crisp air and frozen earth.
“As though you are walking into a snowy landscape and take a big lungful of snowy air, it’s got the snow but also the frozen ground under the snow. I wanted you to sense that there are trees in the background. It’s very much a Nordic landscape on a crisp winter morning when it’s well below zero.”
Notes: Aldehydes, Juniper, Cyclamen, Black Pepper, Cold Effects

Yule Tree

A picture-perfect Christmas tree.
“I wanted to do a spruce as it’s growing, ready to be your Christmas tree – so here are the fresh young shoots as well as the smell of the Christmas tree when you bring it into your house for Christmas. So, it’s Nordic spruce, not a typical pine – the smell is more delicate and leafy, there’s almost a fruitiness to it and it’s absolutely the smell of Christmas for me. It’s not Christmas until you have the real live tree in the house. The tradition was that you would go and physically fetch your tree on Christmas Eve, and you’d go to cut it down from the forest as a family.”
Notes: Fir Balsam abs, Cypress, Elemi, Labdanum, Amber, Oakmoss, Pine

Pomander

A traditional orange pomander dotted in spices.
“For this accord, I wanted to capture an orange pomander with cloves, but I’ve also thought of the Christmas stockings stuffed with clementines and gingerbread – the whole idea is combining citrus and spices. There’s a bit of floralcy in this as well – I added carnations and orange blossom – to make it a bit more sophisticated.”
Notes: Cinnamon, Clove, Nutmeg, Orange, Orange Flower, Clementine, Mandarin, Carnation, Patchouli, Amber

Danish Christmas

This fragrance captures all of the sensations of the individual accords, in a wearable perfume that can be used by the actors and ushers as well as to scent the decorations and space.

“I wanted to take slices of each of the accords. Up top you’ve got the aldehydes from Snow Globe, and the spice and citrus from Pomander. From the Yule Tree, I’ve taken the resins and balsams and the ambery side, with some of the woodiness, so the complete fragrance is this warming and cosy Christmas hug. I’ve added a slight gingerbread note in there as well, to evoke the feeling of baking Christmas treats and festive cosiness.”
Notes: Aldehydes, Orange, Clementine, Mandarin, Jasmine Absolute, Cedarwood Atlas, Carnation, Cinnamon, Orange Flower Absolute, Clove, Nutmeg, Benzoin, Incense, Sandalwood, Patchouli, Fir Balsam, Labdanum, Oakmoss

About the Show

The Globe Theatre stands empty, the stage bare, the Christmas tree undecorated and we need your help.

Someone has stolen the magic of Christmas from Snowdrop, the fairy who stands watch over our wooden ‘O’ during the winter months. Comedian Sandi Toksvig and her merry gang need your help to find it and bring it back to the Globe.

Sing along to classic Christmas songs with the tremendous Fourth Choir, prepare to make paper chains to decorate the theatre and get ready to harness your belief in the spirit of the season to help restore some festive cheer.

This is a show for the entire family so tell everyone you know to put on their favourite Christmas jumpers and join us for the most heart-warming of gatherings.

Help us spread the cheer further. In the spirit of storytelling and gift giving, we’re inviting audiences to bring along a brand-new children’s book as a present to put under the Christmas at the (Snow) Globe tree, which we’ll donate to local charities that support children and young people.

Created and directed by Sandi Toksvig and Jenifer Toksvig, Christmas at the (Snow) Globe will have integrated BSL for every performance. There will be captioned performances on Sunday 22 December at 2.00PM and 6.00PM, and the audio described performance will be on Saturday 21 December at 2.00PM, with a touch and scent tour on the stage at 12 noon.

BeauFort London launches Terror & Magnificence

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Last weekend at Pitti Fragranze’s 17th edition, BeauFort London launched their latest perfume, Terror & Magnificence, created by Olfiction perfumer Pia Long. The fragrance has already drawn praise from the perfume community, with Sergey Borisov of Fragrantica naming it among his favourite launches at the show. Below, Pia shares her notes and thoughts on the creative process.

Terror & Magnificence by BeauFort London
Terror & Magnificence by BeauFort London

Terror and Magnificence – Perfumer’s Notes

Leo Crabtree’s creative ideas around perfumery are larger-than-life, with gothic horror, punk and metal influences. The fragrances he has thus far coaxed out of perfumers have had enormous presence. The idea of something that forces you to pay attention to it; wearable art – these have been the underpinnings of BeauFort London. We happened to meet through some other work we were doing together, and Leo smelled an accord I’d created of concrete and hyper-real brutalism. Of course, there is no “concrete essential oil”, yet somehow, I’d managed to create a smell that made sense as wet concrete and towering brutalist architecture.

We started working together on some concepts, and I developed a smoke accord for Leo, which felt at once enormous and transparent. This sparked something.

My style of perfumery is probably best described as magic realism. I like to create something hyper-real, and then push it to be more than the real thing, and add fantasy elements. When Leo’s concept for Terror & Magnificence landed on my desk, I immediately felt what the idea’s texture had to be. Darkness of the kind that makes you doubt your own senses. The new scent is based on the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor – and Leo’s brief introduced semi-mythologised elements of Egyptology into church settings; the fantasy elements of mummies about to crawl out of the ground just beneath the apparently civilised surface.

I used smells of the church itself – incense, the wooden pews, the stone floors, and added a sinister, unsettling presence with an accord of a stone cellar that has a whisper of decay. The brief contained a wonderfully evocative sentence: “And one is caught off guard by a vision of Rameses II, almost as if his spirit is trapped somehow beneath the church floor.”

Terror & Magnificence by BeauFort London
Hawksmoor’s Christ Church features on the bottle of Terror & Magnificence

For the darkness, I blended the smoke accord from our earlier meetings with tar, myrrh, benzoin, styrax and a kyphi accord I’d been researching for a while. I like to build individual pieces of the perfume like scenes in a story, and then do multiple trials of them together at different proportions, and once I’m set on an overall harmony, I’ll tinker with the composition to fine tune it until the idea is fully realised. In working with Leo, there is definitely a case of two creative minds trying to bring something into the world, rather than one artist who is being instructed. Leo’s direction and his instinct for what would communicate his vision perfectly was very important.

I listened to a lot of music that set the mood for me during the creative process for this – I think especially Sunn O))) and Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard both had the kinds of tracks that felt right for this perfume’s mood.

The perfume that we created feels like it always existed, as though we’ve conjured a myth into being from the ether. It evolves on each skin I’ve tried it on – some bring out more of the incense, for some the resins and leather, some the myrrh and smoke.

Terror & Magnificence will be available at BeauFort London stockists in the coming weeks.

Olfiction Creates The Signature Scent for Beached Beauty Products

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Beached is an all-natural beauty brand founded by Australian entrepreneur Meg Gallagher. For Beached, Meg has captured the easy-breezy beach culture of her homeland in a trio of products for hair, skin and body, that celebrate a natural approach, both in terms of their effect (the brand’s strap line is “bare beauty”) but also the ingredients used. Whilst Beached seems cheeky and fun (and it is) it’s also a brand that takes a serious approach to quality, blending excellent, purposeful ingredients to make exceptional products that firm, texturise and bronze.

To scent the Beached products, Meg approached Olfiction, briefing our perfumer, Pia Long, to create an all-natural fragrance that matched the vibe and ethos of the brand. Pia worked closely with Meg to compose a beachy-floral scent that blends the hot, tropical nuances of ylang ylang with the zesty, juicy quality of yellow mandarin and the warmth of Australian sandalwood, which pays homage to Meg’s Aussie roots, but also adds a touch of sunkissed skin. Incorporated into the products (specifically the Bondi Bum body firmer and Urban Waves hair texturiser), this fragrance brings Beached to life, evoking endless days spent at the beach under the sea spray and hot sun.

The Beached fragrance contains notes of:

Bergamot
Mandarin yellow
Roman chamomile
Australian sandalwood
Ylang extra

“Meg’s brand ethos really resonated with me because she wanted to create lovely, effective products that felt good to use – and that was entirely her focus, not the naturalness of the brand; the natural part just “is” because those were the materials in the formulas that appealed to her aesthetically. So, I wanted to go along with this concept, too, and create a fragrance that mirrors this feeling.

The perfumery challenges were mainly that to get something recognisable as a signature scent but still conveying the natural brand signals that you’d expect to find meant working with some key notes and clever twists to combine the best of both worlds. Additionally, Meg was in love with some citrus accords I’d created but citrus is problematic for anything to be used in the sun, so I chose furanocoumarin-free materials and used them at the maximum sensible level. I wanted to send out a subliminal message about being on the beach – that’s the theme after all! – so the floral aspect being ylang ylang made complete sense as a natural component of ylang oil is benzyl salicylate which was traditionally used in suntan lotion as a core ingredient, and so people associate the smell of it with being on the beach.

We’ve ended up with a sophisticated, caring natural fragrance that matches the feel of the products really well.”

Pia Long, Olfiction Perfumer

The Beached collection consists of three products:

Bondi Bum, Natural Body Firmer (£21.95/175ml), a body lotion designed to naturally firm skin, leaving it smoother and tighter. Featuring a fragrance created by Olfiction.

Urban Waves, Natural Hair Texturiser (£18.95/175ml), a sea salt spray that adds volume to hair as well as conditions featuring a fragrance created by Olfiction.

Rays for Days, Natural Bronzing Serum (£22.95/45ml) to be used on its own, mixed with a base or as a highlighter.

To read more about Beached head on over to beached.com.

At Olfiction, we specialise in perfumery and can work with you to create a unique fragrance for your brand, whether that be for a fine fragrance, home fragrance or cosmetic product. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can develop a fragrance for your brand, drop us a line to get in touch.

O L F I C T I O N
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