Just over a year ago I wrote about a new scent, a perfume, an aftershave called ‘Paper Passion’…basically the smell of fresh print. A smell that I love-love-love. A few days ago, I came across ‘Helvetica: The Perfume’…and wondered how on earth they could bottle a font, a typographic legacy. Fresh print is real…so how can something non-tangible be recreated as a smell?
“In 1957, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann set out to create a new sans-serif typeface for the Swiss design market. Their goal: to create a highly legible and completely neutral expression of the Modernist design movement to which they belonged. This typeface was to have no intrinsic meaning, allowing the content to convey the message. Helvetica has gone on to become arguably the most ubiquitous and widely used typeface in history.”
It is a limited edition new scent, a unisex Modernist perfume/aftershave, ‘distilled down to only the purest and most essential elements to allow you and the content, to convey your message with the utmost clarity.’ It is air. It is water. It is you. It makes me smile. This product is not necessarily about the quality of the scent…although distilled to a high purity…it is about the parody of what it actually stands for and represents…it is about good (product) design with the 24k gold print on the bottle and the letterpressed exterior packaging. It is about responding to a subject, a typeface that is deeply embedded in everyday culture today, seen (or missed) it is everywhere you are in the world. Even though it is the scent of nothing…it says so much. And a sure way of making text, font, typography, word lovers like myself incredibly happy. Well I am word girl…
Rachel Marsden's Words 