Detroit Perfume-Maker Says New Scents Will Help Us Move Past Pandemic
As the “nose” at Sfumato Fragrances, Detroit-based perfume maker Kevin Peterson is creating a smell that sends the message “we’re clean” at his business — and tracing the roots of how we think of cleanliness back to the bubonic plague.
If your house smelled like lemon on a Saturday morning, it was a cleaning day. That smell of fresh citrus isn’t just a novelty — the acidity of lemon makes it an excellent cleaning agent.
“You may think of [scent] as a fashion accessory, but it really can be used to communicate.” — Kevin Peterson, Detroit-based perfume maker
As we move forward in a post-COVID world, however, what will the future of scent be? Will the scent of lemon persist? Will we associate the smell of hand sanitizer with this current global pandemic moving forward?
It’s a question that Detroit-based perfume maker Kevin Peterson has been pondering.
Click on the player above to hear how the future of scent can help move society past COVID-19.
“We don’t often think of scents as a mode of communication,” says Kevin Peterson, the ‘nose’ at Sfumato Fragrances and co-owner and cocktail ‘scientist’ at Castalia, a scent-infused cocktail lounge in the Cass Corridor (it’s considered the only one of it’s kind in the U.S.) “You may think of it as a fashion accessory, but it really can be used to communicate.”
Scent has become a focal point as we start to re-examine how we use public spaces and the smells we associate with cleanliness.
“A lot of our idea of what clean scents are actually goes back to plague times,” says Peterson. “During the bubonic plague in Europe, the predominant theory of how disease spread was that bad smells transmitted it and the way to counteract that was with good smells,” says Peterson. “So things like pine, lemon and rosemary were actually what people used in theory to rid themselves from the plague. Strangely, hundreds of years later, a lot of those ideas are still what dominate our idea of what clean smells like.”
As businesses and restaurants begin to reopen with newly implemented safe and health regulations, Peterson says that identifying if a place is clean or not will be a “potent form of communication.”
“You can read a sign that says we [clean] every five minutes, but if you smell that cleanliness, you absorb that information on a much deeper level than reading a sign,” says Peterson.
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