Perfumes that aren’t

The art of perfumery is a complex one. I’m not a fragrance head, with only a couple of bottles of long-stale scents. But even with my limited experience, I can pick out that a perfume has incredibly complex layered smells, each building on the rest, and they interact with your own skin chemistry. Something that smells great on you might be odious on someone else—scent is a complex beast.

But what happens when a perfume doesn’t try to do that. What happens when you have a scent that smells like (almost) nothing on its own?

A couple of days ago, I learned of Molecule 01, a fragrance that...well...isn’t. Apparently it was briefly influencer-popular a few years ago, but outside my radar. It’s from the British company Escentric Molecule, and who release all their products in pairs; the Escentric complex version, and the Molecule pure version. Molecule 01 is “Iso E Super”, a chemical synthesized in the 70s, and known under a bunch of trade names.

If you believe the hype, it smells totally different on different people—which is fascinating. And the reviews of it, shall we say, polarizing.

But if this is a chemical that has been synthesized for half a century, why the hell does it cost north of $100 for a few ounces? Which is an excellent question—you can buy generics of Iso E Super on eBay for a fraction of the price. Some folks say you can’t smell a difference, some say you can, or that the dupes are really close—and complicating things, some people may just not be able to smell the chemical to begin with.

Escentric Molecule has a number of other single-molecule smells, like Molecule 02 is Ambroxan; and other scent makers have similar one-ingredient products, like Juliette Has a Gun’s Not a Perfume, which is all Cetalox.

How much of this all is hype? Don’t all perfumes smell different on different people, anyway? Does it smell like cedar, or like nothing? Honestly, I have no idea.

But I’m intensely curious about this stuff, so I’ll drop a few bucks on a sample. Best case, I smell amazing and unique; worst case it’s unbearable; somewhere in the middle it’s cedar shavings. But it’s worth checking out.

Further reading: If you want to know a bit more about perfumes, the Article of Interest podcast on the topic is great.

Note: Nothing here is fact checked, nor subject to more than 10 minutes of research. It’s just what I found interesting.