February 11, 2023
By Amber Kallor
February 4th, 2023
Who Wants to Smell Like a Dead Dinosaur? Apparently, Lots of People
Not everyone wants to reek of pop stars and roses. Peculiar fragrances with notes such as gasoline and fossilized amber, and names like ‘Ink’ are trending. Here, 8 to try.
“YOU SMELL interesting,” is the best compliment you can give Katya Roelse. “I don’t think perfume is just about smelling good, it’s about being provocative and starting a conversation,” said the 47-year-old professor in Newark, Del. Some of her favorite fragrances include whiffs of brown tape like Comme des Garçons’s eponymous eau and potato like DSH Perfume’s Starry Nightshade.
Unlike mass fragrances that rely on celebrities and sex to drive sales, new niche scents entice olfactory sophisticates with eyebrow-raising names (like Dead Dinosaur) and unusual notes (like tar). Some people care “more about their pleasure than emulating a celebrity,” said New York perfumer Frank Voelkl, who’s had a hand in such hyped scents as Ariana Grande’s Ari.
Robert Gerstner, co-owner of New York perfumery Aedes, which specializes in hard-to-find fragrances, said year-over-year sales were up 30% between 2020 and 2022. Individuality and exclusivity are key for Mr. Gerstner’s customers, who don’t want to sniff people sporting their scent on every street corner. Consumers are “craving…quirkiness and creativity,” said Carlos Huber, a New York fragrance developer.
But peculiarity only goes so far. “It’s one thing to want to experience a fragrance but it’s another to wear it all the time,” said Linda G. Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation in New York. A scent must satisfy the senses (not just reek) if it’s going to sell. So shocking notes are often blended with traditional ones, said Mr. Voelkl.
Madisin McLauchlan, 36, a Vancouver teacher’s assistant, prefers unlikely scents that trigger pleasant memories, while Paris PR executive Angharad Coates, 37, uses distinctive fragrances to mark her territory—particularly when it comes to lovers’ abodes. Zack Bochicchio, 26, a Nashville copyright associate, sees scent as a form of expression. “I wouldn’t like if a person called out [my] fragrance. But if someone borrowed my sweatshirt and said ‘This smells like you,’ in a good way, I’ll have achieved my goal.” Here, five scents sure to leave an impression.
Harvest Mouse
Weirdest Note: Hay
Who It’s For: Anyone with a Berkshires abode who’s seen “Ratatouille.”
Victor Wong, the Toronto founder of the brand Zoologist, owns over 200 animal figurines that inspire his stable of scents, which includes Cow, Bee and Squid. The latest addition, Harvest Mouse, conjures rodent-friendly wheat fields via beer and hay extract. Milan perfumer Luca Maffei added notes of chamomile and orange blossom to replicate the “warmth of the sun.” The result “smells like rum-raisin ice cream,” said Mr. Wong. Bottles will go on sale Feb. 18. $175 for 60ml, ZoologistPerfumes.com
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The Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.
June 19, 2019
By Rachel Syme
June 18, 2019
[excerpt]
Zoologist Dodo
The plant that animates this fragrance, which is inspired by the extinct birds of Mauritius Island, is the fiddlehead fern. “Dodo embodies the green and herbaceous elements of a traditional fougère, but mixed with something strange and unexpected,” said the Zoologist founder Victor Wong.
The scent also has a fatty underbelly of synthetic ambergris (an unctuous mineral material derived, glamorously, from whale vomit), which gives it something of an ancient, wet cement feel. This is a green that is sprouting up from the pavement.
April 10, 2017
The Hindu, April 8th, 2017
by Surya Praphulla Kumar
In 2012, a burnt-out video game designer at a Toronto-based toy company found his calling in a hotel room, after smelling a musky bottle of Le Labo hand lotion. Wong recalls coming home later to trawl the message boards of popular perfume sites, Basenotes and Fragrantica. “People told me I should learn perfumery and design my own scents, but I knew it would take years of practice to become good at it,” he begins.
So when he decided to launch his own perfume line, Zoologist, he put out an open call. British perfumer, Chris Bartlett, answered it with the idea to capture the essence of a beaver — smelling of wet fur, musk and felled trees. The scent, bottled with a picture of a beaver in Victorian clothing, came out in 2014. And though the perfume blog, CaFleureBon, named it one of the best scents of the year, Wong admits “it was too challenging for many people”. So the duo revisited the formula, adding more “fresh air and river top notes”, and relaunched it successfully late last year.
Today, his menagerie of scents includes Bat, Civet, Panda, Hummingbird, Rhinoceros, Macaque and Nightingale. “Fragrances that are notorious for smelling very animalic get a lot of attention, but I wonder if it’s ‘all talk and no sales’. The challenge for me is whether to bring a strong scent to the market for a small group of people — for the name (and fame) — or something less aggressive for sales,” says Wong, who is working on a scent that will remind the user of walking by a pond.
$125 onwards for 60 ml (₹8,331 approx). Details: shop@zoologistperfumes.com
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Covey, the founder of Olympic Orchid, a US-based brand of handcrafted scents, teamed up with Wong’s Zoologist for Bat, which won the 2016 Art & Olfaction Award (independent). “I didn’t want to make a perfume that literally smells like a bat, but one that represents the cool, earthy, damp limestone cave where they live, the fruit they eat, and the clean, musky smell of their fur,” explains Covey, who trekked through the jungles of Jamaica in search of bat caves.
Though she believes working with animalics isn’t more challenging than any other scent — “it’s all a matter of balance — she believes this niche trend is in the forefront, with the mass market slowly catching up. “The early part of this century was dominated by scents that were ‘clean’ and ‘light’. The resurgence of animalic scents is just the fashion cycle coming back around,” says the perfumer, who is currently working on a scent inspired by a musical composition, which will have animalic notes.
October 25, 2016
By RACHEL SYME OCT. 25, 2016
In 2012, Victor Wong, a video game designer for a toy company in Toronto, had a tiny midlife crisis in his hotel room while on vacation. He felt burned out on work but was strangely revived by sniffing the hotel toiletries, which came from a niche fragrance line he can no longer recall.
What he does remember is that he swooned over the scents, which were spicy, musky and intense. He knew then and there that he wanted to make perfume.
Returning home, Mr. Wong began haunting the message boards of the cult perfume sites BaseNotes and Fragrantica, feverishly researching the formulas behind his favorite scents. The same notes kept popping up: castoreum, civet, musk, ambergris. He realized that he was drawn, in an instinctual way, to animal-derived scents — or rather (because most perfumery materials that come from animals are now banned or heavily regulated) to their lab-created chemical equivalents.
When Mr. Wong worked up the courage to put out an open call online for a perfumer to help him create his fragrance, he already had a specific, and beastly, concept in his head. He would call his line Zoologist, and he would release a series of scents named for the wild creatures that inspired them.
The British perfumer Chris Bartlett was the first to respond, with a bold idea for the maiden fragrance in the Wong menagerie. He wanted to capture the essence of a beaver. Mr. Bartlett proposed a scent that used no real animal ingredients, but smelled strongly of wet fur, dank musk, felled trees and the sour buttery odor of a beaver’s castor sac secretions.
Mr. Wong said yes immediately. When Beaver hit the market in 2014, it immediately became a polarizing sensation in the niche perfume world. CaFleureBon, which reviews cult perfumes, named it one of the best of the year, and fans flocked to its peppery, sweaty funk. But, as Mr. Wong now admits, “it was ultimately too challenging for a lot of people.”
“A lot of people thought it was interesting but said that they would never wear it,” he said. The smell of damp pelt (and the not-so-subtle bodily connotations of the name) made some customers feel uncomfortable rather than swaddled in the dense odor.
So Mr. Wong asked Mr. Bartlett to revisit his formula, and this fall they released Beaver 2016, a riff on the original idea but with more “fresh air and river top notes to make it more attractive.”
Mr. Wong has released six other perfumes, including Bat, a pungent reverie on banana, cave dirt, musk and overripe figs from the perfumer Dr. Ellen Covey that won the top prize at the 2016 Art and Olfaction Awards. The venerable fragrance critic Luca Turin gave Bat a rave, writing that “the fragrance seems lit from within by the earth note all the way to drydown.”
It turns out that Mr. Wong’s animal instincts were right along: In 2016, the demand for fauna-inspired scents is cresting.
“Animalic” is a buzzword floating around the industry, now that the minimalist, clean trend has given way (at least in high-fashion niche circles) to more feral fragrance clouds. Maybe it’s the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment, but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo.
October 06, 2016
Victor Wong of Toronto-based Zoologist Perfumes is so inspired by the animal kingdom that his entire perfume collection celebrates it. In 2013, Wong was just a lover of scent with a day job. He took to the internet to seek out a perfumer who could help him actualize his dream to start his own fragrance brand. He found two via a fragrance forum and started out on his journey. Each Zoologist scent is named for an animal, its formulation designed to conjure the essence and idiosyncrasies of each species. For fall, the natural choice is Bat, an earthy, mineral fragrance layered with dark plum, leather and musk.