You don’t need an airline to travel around the world thanks to the transformative power of perfume. Studies show the impact that scent has on our memories. It allows us to access moments of our lives we want to relive. Perfumers use that scent-memory relationship to capture the mood and feeling of a time or place. That’s why we don’t need to visit Paris to know what it smells like. City-inspired fragrances are your instant ticket to worldwide travel!
Traveling With Scent
Vice President of Global New Product Development at Jo Malone London, Celine Roux, explains that perfumery is always a story. “Wood Sage and Sea Salt was inspired by a trip I took to Cornwall,” Roux says. “In Cornwall, the weather was not so good, and there was this moody drama to that cliff-side. I loved that feeling of freshness and openness. And when I got back to London, I called the perfumer and said, ‘I want to make a fragrance that smells like this cliff.’”
Many perfumers have sought to replicate the scents of internationally famous cities, like Paris and Milan. And one of the latest scents to join the ranks of city-inspired fragrances, Abel’s The Apartment, goes even further. Concentrating on the very heart of the city, this scent is inspired by the famous Paris apartments, L’Appartement Étoile. Overlooking the Arc de Triumph, these apartments are the height of Parisian chic.
By choosing ingredients local to the area or famously associated with it, fragrance experts craft homages to the cities they love. For example, spices like saffron become signatures of Casablanca, Morocco, while Italian-grown bergamot symbolizes Milan.