What does good music smell like?

This was the central question behind the series Notes, produced in collaboration with creative agency Yummy Colours and olfactive artist Marissa Zappas.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could smell an album? Scent is one of the most underutilized senses, particularly when it comes to advertising because you have to be there to experience it. But couldn’t we imagine it, or what something might just smell like?

Diego and Denize of Yummy Colours picked 8 albums to base this series on and Marissa dreamed up what each one could smell like to create a fictional, correlating perfume. The corresponding scents are not your typical perfume smells incorporating such ingredients as “ketchup accord” and “fresh rubber.”

We knew we wanted each new “album cover” to be featuring the literal perfumes Marissa had created. Historically speaking, perfume ads have been (and largely still are) cheesy, overly romanticized, and play to dated stereotypes of femininity.

This series was a fun challenge to tackle the idea of “the new perfume ad” to create something original and colorful and totally unexpected.