Design in Scent

Design Scent is an exclusive design house that crafts couture scent experiences. sisterMAG's Diana Patient talked to the founder Gemma Hopkins in London about a sensation that often is forgotten: the sense of smell

Text & Photos: Diana Patient

The light pours into the townhouse on Arlington Street through an array of glass bottles containing a library of fragrances.

Gemma Hopkins sits holding a bottle of Moroccan Rose oil, one of our many props for today’s photoshoot. Other apparatuses and ingredients are being brought by Anastasia Brozler, a perfumer who works closely with Gemma for Design in Scent, but is most famous for pioneering Bespoke Perfumery in England twenty years ago.

»She [Anastasia] is really rather bonkers« Gemma laughs »but in the most wonderful, delightful, sincere way. I adore her. She’ll be halfway through one thought when she has had

a sudden idea about another one and she is off, and you’re running behind her desperately trying to keep up with her extraordinary imagination, and you know that she is just firing through these formulations in her head as she’s talking and wow, I’m quick but she is so much quicker!«

Though I know canisters, frankincense, pipettes, myrrh, and about twenty other objects must be ingredients for scents, I have no idea what are placed on the grand wooden table at our disposal.

»Anastasia knows a farmer in France who goes out into his fields and handpicks his lavender. He then presses it all by hand, and distills it by hand. It takes months and months to create and from it he only obtains one litre of lavender oil for the whole year. He was the only one in the village who did this and would just pour his litre of lavender oil into the same vat as the rest of the lavender farmers until Anastasia found him, of course. She is the one that gets his litre of lavender oil once a year and it is the most beautiful lavender oil you have ever smelt. Anastasia places great emphasis on supporting reputable farmers that have been in the trade for many generations and extract their oils with great pride. I truly respect her expertise here as it is something that is increasingly forgotten in the modern world of perfumery.«

Tucked behind The Ritz I feel I am being let in on a secret: the perfume industry is a very closed community, as Gemma informs me. I feel worldly as all the continents are being brought to us in scent form. We are in a far away land from the people I see out the window, marching obliviously along Piccadilly.

Gemma Hopkins is the founder of Design in Scent, a company that works creatively with private clients, luxury brands and event planners to create olfactory experiences informed by research into how scent and memories are intertwined. There is the Signature Scent experience, which offers the ‘discerning client’ a chance to work with Design In Scent's senior perfumers to create a bespoke scent made entirely for them. The scent can then be incorporated into bespoke products that fit with an occasion, lifestyle or home. In fact, if you can dream it then it will be designed. All sorts of treasures are created here from scent jewellery designed by London’s finest jewellers, to bespoke glass bottles studded in diamonds, to candles made by England's top chandlers.

After the photographing is done, Gemma and I make our way into

I've always been very creative. Scent was a new medium for my creativity."

Green Park to sit in the first sun of 2015. From the offset, it is quite clear to see Gemma lives and breathes her work. She speaks her thoughts as they come, and although our conversation is punctuated with talk of the shapes of clouds and 'I wonder where that plane is going?', her thoughts mostly take her to the world of Design in Scent.

»Our Scent Salons, most of which have never been offered before, open the doors to this secretive scent world.«

She is talking of her latest venture with perfumer Anastasia, masterclasses devised to entertain and to educate. Their first stop is Venice but Gemma is excited by the endless possibilities and her creativity begins to pour out.

»We can hire a yacht to take guests on a tour around Europe with their noses. Our clients can compare twenty to thirty different jasmines – Indian, Arabian, Jungle, Egyptian, Himalayan – and decide which they believe to be the best in the world. They can travel the world as they discover the ingredients within their Signature Scent and meet the farmers that grow them.«

She talks delightedly about orchids that bloom once a year and other rare ingredients. She pulls story after story from an overwhelming amount of knowledge: I hear tales of Louis XV of France perfuming his fountains to the origins of the first ever perfume made–if you were wondering it is called Kyphi and originated in Ancient Egypt.

Gemma gained her expertise in the field of sensory branding, working on projects that immersed people in sensory environments and created emotional connections between brand and consumer.

»I was working in high-end weddings and events and was looking to launch my own design company, but I wanted to do something different and take people on a journey using the senses. I started exploring suppliers that were outside the industry. I came across a sensory branding agency that I ended up working for–they were responsible for creating part of Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck experience.

I realised during that time that fragrance has the power to transform and take you somewhere. Done correctly, it can create deep and lasting emotional connections between people, places and moments. We were working for brands such as Diageo and Burberry where it was all about creating an experience using scent and sound and connecting to people’s unique memories. By connecting to people's memories, you can harness their emotion and make them feel something, taking them to a place that they are not physically in. They could be sat in a room and yet they’re floating through some memory that they have, which is amazing! And I thought: that’s it! This was all happening in the branding world, but I felt the type of emotional connection created between a consumer and a brand using scent was not being explored enough in the private sphere.«

This is where Design in Scent was born. Gemma began a journey discovering a world that she believes

I love what I am doing. I started doing it because I like to move people with what I am doing."

goes largely unrecognized in our fastpaced visual world. While we seek visual beauty in art and nature, have beautiful silks to touch, sample new cuisines for tastes, and indulge our ears with music, Gemma asks us - other than buying the odd scented candle, how do we enrich our noses?

»Scent has always featured in my life without me really realising it. [...] My two favourites are the smell of a roaring log fire: it’s home it’s warmth it’s comfort, and the smell of freshly cut grass for me is school, it’s my childhood making daisy chains in the field.

I wanted to create a company that would use scent and give it credibility like we have given credibility to sight and sound and even tactiles. We rarely think about the cultivation and enrichment of our sense of smell.

Fragrance speaks to your heart in a way that other things don’t, so the idea is that we create a Signature Scent. We use leading perfumers and enable the client to indulge in what is a beautiful journey in and of itself. A personal pilgrimage which really draws out who you are and who you aspire to be, translating that into a scent. It’s about going back to a time when things were done properly. Everything is made bespoke. It is an opportunity in this visual fast world to take a moment’s respite. What Design in Scent offers is something truly blissful and familiar in an otherwise chaotic epoch. A scent for a client’s home, yacht, plane or car can mean that no matter where in the world they are, they feel at home.«

She explains to me that when you smell something for the very first time, you store that smell away in your limbic system, a part of your brain

Smell can remind you of your childhood or a special point of time."

associated with memories and feelings. When you store that scent away with the memory or emotion you are experiencing at the time, the next time you smell it, that memory or feeling is also reproduced.

Owing to this extraordinary link, many things will remind you of your childhood because that is the first time you smelt them. You learn your cultural repertoire of scents mostly when you are a child, and as you get older you explore new scents that you have not yet connected with a memory. This is what Design In Scent does now.

»We can connect with scents that are nostalgic to conjure up a feeling you already have or we create a new feeling and a new memory for the future with bespoke scent design–something you don’t already have a connection to.«

It is true scent has the ability to take me back to different moments, such as an ex's perfume smelt on the tube, or fresh grass (the English child's perennial association to summer).

I ask her what her favourite scents are.

»The scent of my beautiful boyfriend.« She says with genuine happiness.

I joke at the possibility of her ‘going all Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from Perfume on him’ and trapping his scent in oil to distill it.

»Maybe!« She laughs.

And the scent that most moved her?

»Really bizarre story, I was very sad to lose my grandfather at the age of about 15. It was very sudden and we were actually staying at his house to visit him in the hospital. I decided to sleep in his bed and under his pillow there was a pair of [clean] socks, and what possessed me to smell them - I don’t know!

The socks smelt of imperial leather soap, fire – they [her grandparents] had a log fire so my love of that smell is probably where that comes from – and just his smell I suppose. Unfortunately that evening he died but the brain is very clever. The extraordinary thing is that in the same way smelling a smell can make you think about something or someone, sometimes you can smell something that isn’t there. [...] I would smell the smell of those socks and it wasn’t sadness but it made me think about him. It’s so powerful.«

»I don’t think people realise how much humans have a scent. There are other cultures that place much more value on scent than we do. The Ongee people of the Adaman Islands are a tribe that believe the life force of all living beings resides in their smell, which comes from their bones. They touch the tip of their noses to refer to themselves because their olfactory nature has so much importance to them. It is their essence, it is their being. We are colder in that respect, more rational and would scoff at that idea, but actually how right are they because hasn’t everyone got a scent soul.«

It is starting to get a little colder and darker in Green Park and the interview is coming to a close. Gemma is lost in thought for a while but her parting words to me, away from the mystery and polish of her wonderful business are thoughtful and genuine:

»I hope that Design In Scent can bring a golden age of scent back and educate people to believe that scent isn’t just a frivolous luxury, it is something that can truly enhance you life. If people could just stop when they are walking in the park and use their noses to identify the perfume landscape around them, wouldn't that be incredible?«

I agree. We say goodbye and Gemma disappears into London ready for her next chapter.

Days later I find myself thinking about Gemma's words. What scents are there left to discover and what memories are about to be attached to them?

I stop on my way to a meeting, close my eyes and breath in. I don’t smell much at first, but then my senses start to sort out the olfactory landscape. The smell of summer in the air, the London dust, the perfume I chose when I was eighteen, the greenery around me. Maybe in the future if I find these smells in one place again, it will take me back here to this very moment in time.