Perfume After the Ingredient: Notes on Material, Meaning, and Context

Written by Adill Ali

Introduction

We talk about perfume as if categories could explain it: niche, artisanal, natural, synthetic, material driven, concept driven. Categories help with shelving; they rarely help with understanding. If perfume is an art, the material is its medium, not its message. Like paint for Pollock, materials matter because they make an idea perceptible. They are not, by themselves, the point, but rather tools required for the context to be created and the idea expressed.

This position, call it relational perfumery, sits inside a live debate. Museums, philosophers, and artists have argued for decades over whether scent can be art, and if so, what kind of art it is. The Museum of Arts and Design’s landmark exhibition ‘The Art of Scent: 1889-2012’ pressed that great perfumes are artworks with histories, authorship, and form, not merely commodities or toiletries. At the same time, smell artists such as Sissel Tolaas have used odour in installations to explore memory, fear, place, and time, making scent legible as a medium for artistic thought beyond the bottle.

Against the prejudice that scent cannot be art

Much aesthetic theory historically dismissed smell as a lesser sense, too private, too immediate, too bodily. From classical western philosophy through Kant and Hegel, smell was treated as cognitively poor and aesthetically unreliable, a view that lingered well into modern aesthetics. Recent scholarship has challenged this, showing that smell can support genuine aesthetic judgement and meaning.

The museum turn toward olfactory work, with curatorial projects, purpose-built installations, and serious criticism, has normalised scent as a medium of artistic composition and reception. Chandler Burr’s writing for ‘The Art of Scent’ frames canonical perfumes as designed forms with style, structure, and historical context.

Claim: If art is the making of form that bears meaning, then perfume qualifies not because it smells pleasant, but because it can be composed to say something.

Material is necessary yet not sufficient

Every art is a form of expression, and each form is defined by its medium. Music cannot exist without sound; sculpture without matter; poetry without language. But we do not judge a poem by the quality of its ink, nor a composition solely on the quality of the instrument, the instrument maker strives for perfection of its tools to have a perfect expression medium. In perfumery, oud, rose, amber, musk, synthetics, and naturals are not the content of the work; they are the means of making content sensible. The quality, sourcing, and chemistry of materials matter because they expand the perfumer’s expressive range, including tension, volume, persistence, and contrast, not because the pedigree of an oil is intrinsically meaningful, but rather the characteristic of said oil expands the perfumer's olfactory lexicon.

Debates about naturals versus synthetics show the same point. Modern perfumery’s breakthroughs were made by combining both and expanding the grammar of possible forms. To restrict either palette is to restrict expression.

Conclusion: Materials deserve study for what they can do in relation, how they blend, oppose, veil, or amplify, not for what they are in isolation.

Why material driven perfumery loops back to ideas

As of late, market trends and consumer preferences have reverted to ‘material centered’ compositions. A common defense of material driven work says the perfumer should let the material speak and reveal different facets of ingredients. But revelation is impossible without framing. To perceive a facet is already to compare and interpret, for example smoky or clean, warm or cool, animalic or mineral, each facet comes to life when two or more ingredients are combined to create the context for which that facet can exist, and hence be expressed. Comparison brings context, and context brings concept. The moment a perfumer lets oud speak, they are arranging conditions that make its speech legible, using contrast, dilution, accord placement, temperature, texture, and time. Framing is authorship.

Material absolutism cannot escape ideas. It often hides them under the language of purity or authenticity. Philosophers of smell note the same pivot: olfactory meaning arises not from a naked essence, but from relations, including how odours interact with memory, language, and situation.

Composition as choreography

Relational perfumery proposes that the art of scent lies in choreography, the structuring of relations through time. Materials are like dancers, each with its own weight, flexibility, and timbre. The art lies in the score that governs their encounter. This shifts perfumery from the ontology of materials, what a thing is, to a semiotics of scent, what a thing means in context. Installations by artists such as Sissel Tolaas make this explicit by staging smells in architectures of touch, memory, and place. The piece is the relational system, not any single odour.

Within bottled perfumery, serious criticism already treats compositions as works with style and rhetoric, including development, climax, denouement, and figures of speech, rather than lists of ingredients. Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez helped popularise this way of reading by discussing perfumes as designed objects with aesthetic effects, not ingredient pedigrees.

A practical ethic of materials without fetish

Relational perfumery is not anti material. It is anti fetish. It asks the perfumer to study materials with rigour, including chemistry, sourcing, safety, maceration, and volatility, precisely so they can be used with intention. It values high quality paint, to keep Pollock’s analogy, because higher fidelity allows clearer expression. But it resists the slide from respect to worship. The question shifts from whether this is the rarest oud to what this particular oud does here, and what tension, space, or silence it creates.

Exhibitions that embed scent in displays, for example the Metropolitan Museum of Art presentation Sleeping Beauties with contributions by scent researchers, make this ethic visible. The odour is not presented as an object of veneration, but as a vector of understanding, a way to grasp history and material culture more fully.

What this means for Hunayn

Hunayn’s practice stands inside this relational tradition. We study materials in and out of isolation to deepen our vocabulary. We compose them to articulate ideas, including time, devotion, calligraphy, and place. Our batches are small because meaning requires attention, not because scarcity proves value. We honour material truth, resins that breathe, woods that darken, and musks that soften, but we do so to say something beyond them, such as an ayah encountered at dawn, the hush of a courtyard after rain, or the warmth of a palm that lingers on oud polished wood, or the representations of a culture.

If a reader asks whether this is material driven or idea driven, the honest answer is simple. The material serves the idea. The idea is made of material. The art is the relation.

Appendix: Where the debate stands

• Perfume can be art. Exhibitions and curatorial writing treat perfume as a designed medium with history, authorship, and form.
• Smell has been undervalued in philosophy. From classical sources through Kant and Hegel, smell was sidelined. Contemporary aesthetics counters this with argument and examples that show smell can ground real aesthetic judgement.
• There is smell art beyond perfume. Artists such as Sissel Tolaas build installations where odour functions as the primary medium, addressing memory, fear, environment, and place.
• Naturals and synthetics both matter. Celebrated modern works rely on both, expanding expression. Reducing the palette reduces meaning.

References

• Chandler Burr, ‘The Art of Scent: 1889–2012’ (New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2012), exhibition catalogue and essays.
• Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of the Power of Judgement’, trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; orig. pub. 1790).
• G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; lectures delivered in the 1820s).
• Larry Shiner, ‘The Fear of Smell’, in Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020;
• Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, ‘Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell’ (London: Routledge, 1994).
• Jim Drobnick (ed.), ‘The Smell Culture Reader’ (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
• Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, ‘Perfumes: The A–Z Guide’, updated edn (London: Profile Books, 2018; orig. pub. 2008).
• Robert R. Calkin and J. Stephan Jellinek, ‘Perfumery: Practice and Principles’(New York: Wiley, 1994).
• Sissel Tolaas, selected exhibitions and projects documenting smell as artistic medium, various museum catalogues and project statements.