Can you smell design?

To create their compositions, the duo begin to think of the scents synesthetically, guided by a “scent master doc” prepared by D.S. & Durga’s co-founder David Seth Moltz. “Each brief from D.S. & Durga is different, but the process is very much the same. David has a very thorough sense of story with each release. Before we begin to dive into concepts, he will send a document which includes songs, places, colours, moods, scenes, and movies, as well as a written description. Once we have this guiding principle, we start to have conversations about how we can reinterpret and simplify, or expand upon, aspects of the document to represent the scent. In these instances, less is more, and we’ll often target our focus on one very specific component of the brief rather than trying to merge several together into one concept,” says co-founder Wade Jeffree.

There’s nothing expected about Wade and Leta’s images; instead, they create arresting, surreal landscapes imbued with a made-you-look energy. Their visual for Burning Barbershop, a scent described by D.S. & Durga as – “a fire broke out in the Curling Bros. barbershop in Westlake, N.Y. in 1891. All the shaving tonics with their spearmint, lime, vanilla, and lavender burned. A charred bottle was found half-full. It smelled like this” – depicts a hand, covered in molten wax and flaming candles, holding the perfume bottle.

“Burning Barbershop actually had a very simplistic origin story; the bottle and the smell are based on a bottle of aftershave that was salvaged from a fire. The smell is very distinct – it smells deeply like burnt men’s aftershave,” says Leta. “Understanding the story of the origin of the smell, we wanted to create something that felt like it had just been salvaged from a fire. In doing that, though, we wanted to create some level of surrealism within the photo and not allude to the notions of tragedy and devastation that are often associated with a fire. We wanted to create an image that felt like someone had reached deep into that barbershop and pulled out this last bottle of this amazing elixir.”

Debaser, named after the shrill sound of a pixie’s song, is a shock to the system, so it needed a visual to match. “David and Kavi spoke about Un Chien Andalou, a film by Salvador Dali in which a woman has her eyeball sliced, as a visual metaphor for their fragrance, and we took that to heart in thinking about how we could achieve the same level of ecstatic shock and hot fever dream aesthetic with a fragrance,” adds Leta. And so, the duo created a startling image of the fragrance being sprayed into a woman’s eye, turning the scent and its story into something palpable.

At D.S. & Durga, the identity serves as the backdrop, while the art direction takes the wheel in creating visual metaphors that not only accompany a fragrance but make us feel like we’ve already smelled it. Rather intentionally, Wade and Leta create a point of tension between the quieter design, and the more expressive art direction. “If the design is the guardrail on the road, we are the 4WD car going off-road,” says Wade.

Where Wade and Leta’s work leans into surrealism to visualise a scent, Clue Perfumery takes a more introspective approach – using storytelling, symbolism, and subtle sensory cues to bridge the gap between scent and sight. This translation of one sense to another was something Caleb Vanden Boom, designer and co-founder of Clue, was thinking about when crafting the identity and brand world for the indie label. “Translating scent into sight is a process we found very inspiring. My approach to Clue’s visual identity is always in service of storytelling. Each fragrance has a distinct concept and narrative, and the visual work exists to heighten and introduce that story,” says Caleb. “Since many people experience Clue for the first time online, we also have to bridge the gap of not being able to smell the scent immediately. A key question is often: how can we use visuals to make someone feel connected to a scent they’ve never smelled?”

Clue does this in many ways. Take, for example, the custom illustrations for each of their three debut scents: Morel Map, Warm Bulb, and With the Candlestick. Each of the symbols – designed by Bráulio Amado, Sophy Hollington, and Gustavo Eandi – delivers on the promise of capturing the character of each scent. In working with three artists, Caleb ensured that each symbol carried the essence of the designer’s mark-making process. Sophy, known for her bold, linocut-inspired aesthetic, renders the symbol for With the Candlestick in a striking, blocky composition, giving the image a weight and permanence that nods to both mystery and tradition. In contrast, Bráulio’s illustration for Morel Map is loose and gestural, almost sketch-like, reflecting the organic, earthy quality of the scent itself. Ask Caleb to pick a favourite, and he points towards Gustavo’s illustration for Warm Bulb. “The fragrance is meant to evoke the scent of hot dust burning on an old lightbulb. Gustavo expanded that into a small vignette – someone reading by lamplight, a glass teapot reflecting an eye on its surface,” he says.

Colour is one of the main tools Caleb uses to stir the sense of smell. The label for Clue’s latest release, The Point – which is described as “a cup of jasmine tea, brewed with ocean water” – is awash in an “oceanic bright but cartoonish blue”, while Warm Bulb features a dusty yellow which brings to mind an old dimmed lightbulb, warm to the touch. “Each of our bottles has a unique label colour, carefully chosen to reflect the story of the scent. We debate over Pantone swatches to land on the exact right shade, knowing that colour subtly primes the user to expect a certain kind of experience. We think about the design and fragrance work in tandem, enhancing each other,” says Caleb.

Elsewhere, the core brand identity is treated as a container, stepping back in terms of expressiveness so the individual fragrance’s stories can take centre stage. As Caleb says, the brand typography is intentionally neutral – “a sophisticated but stable foundation that allows us to introduce more expressive typographic treatments for each scent. Typography can be just as sensory as imagery. We think about it in terms of texture, weight, and rhythm – does a typeface feel fluid, sharp, dense, airy? Just like scent, typography has its own atmosphere.”

The brand has tucked sensory touches in other elements too, such as the grainy animation of the logo which is designed to mimic the experience of perfume application – how scent disperses, diffuses, and fades into the air. The structure of the symbol dissolves in a soft, ambient way, mirroring the behavior of a scent.

This idea of treating the identity as a foundation to build the stories of the individual scents upon also appealed to Oddity Fragrance, a perfume label launched by Hong Kong-based creative studio Oddity. Though rare, it’s always intriguing when a designer or studio ventures into fragrance – applying their visual and conceptual sensibilities to a medium that exists beyond sight. Oddity got pulled into the world of scent, drawn in by their innate fascination with perfumes. “It is inspiring – you can’t see smell, yet it is a magnificent driver of inspiration that provokes vivid images in your mind. It can be different each time and never the same between different people,” says founder and creative director Alice Mourou. “We just couldn’t resist the possibility to play with it, so we launched our own label as a perfect playground of visible-invisible.”

Oddity Fragrance’s sparse, technical identity is minimal, allowing the design of the bottle and its voluptuous caps to take the limelight. The bottles are treated as artefacts, while the epoxy resin caps – different for each scent – all hold an imperfect raw material. “We definitely were looking to make a visual statement piece, as it was the only chance to get into retail and attract attention,” says Alice. “The cap did it all.”

Here, instead of the identity, the product design tugs at our sense of smell and does all the talking. The team carefully uses materiality to echo the tone and feel of each scent. “We pick the cap’s materials according to scents – wood for a warm scent, charcoal for a dark one, and metal for the cold. For our new scent, Delulu, that’s about finding youth, we used broken plastic toys that we found on the shores of Hong Kong,” says Alice.

Amid a swelling wave of indie labels launching online, product design has to work harder than ever to make an impression. Unlike identity design, which sets the tone through typography and colour, the bottle itself serves as a more immediate, tactile bridge to the scent – its form, weight, and materiality creating an almost physical prelude to the fragrance inside.

Few brands get this as well as Ormaie. Each of Ormaie’s twelve-faceted glass bottles has a unique, sculptural beech wood cap – and this is where the storytelling happens. In the case of their “solar” scent, 28°– an ode to summer, inspired by a walk in the south of France, with notes of jasmine, tuberose, and orange blossom – the perfume gets a round, white disc as the topper, evoking the sun. “If I tell you ‘white, round, and 28°,’ then you are already in the right space to understand that summer feeling, when you can’t look at the sun that is too bright, which washes everything in a pale glow. When I then show you the bottle, you can almost smell it, right?” asks Paris-based creative director Jade Lombard, the designer behind the project. Yvonne, a feminine “chypre accord of rose and patchouli, modernised by red fruits,” gets a big red cap reminiscent of a rose, while for Papier Carbone, which bottles “a childhood memory; the smell of school,” Lombard crafted an upturned yellow semi-oval, a child’s toy.