While sugar continues to inspire perfumes, salt is making an interesting breakthrough. Culinary, marine, or more imaginative, this salty olfactory trend is ushering in a host of new and original ingredients. Could salt be the future of sugar?
In response to the gourmand wave that has surged in recent years, perfumers are coming up with salty or sweet-salty accords based on seeds, spices, and even vegetables. Salt is also allowing brands to reinvent the ocean-inspired scents of the 1990s. Fragrances including Issey Miyake’s Le Sel d’Issey, Salty Wood (L’Atelier Parfum), Acqua Sale (Bottega Veneta), and Sel d’Ambre (Balmain Beauty) increasingly claim salt in their names. Although it must be said that salt itself has no smell, it offers perfumers great creative freedom.
Without a scent of its own, salt is said to give perfumers creative freedom ©L’Atelier Parfum
In Bottega Veneta’s Acqua Sale, notes of spices, amber, and wood blend to recreate “the enveloping scent of salt water on the skin.” This idea is echoed in Sel d’Argent, a fragrance from niche brand BDK Parfums. “I used Adoxal, a cold aldehyde, and Calone, a marine note that I softened with salicylates and musks for a bronzed salty skin effect,” explains Flair perfumer Anne-Sophie Behaghel.
While salt gives a modern twist to the iodized trend, the salty theme also interests creators from a culinary perspective, Behaghel explains. “More and more brands are asking us for creations inspired by savory cuisine. For the Culot Thé fragrance by Versatile, I used a hint of garlic essence, and in their latest scent, we worked on a roast chicken accord.” The perfume retains its vegan status thanks to a combination of thiazine and pyrazine.
BDK’s Sel d’Argent eau de parfum ©BDK Parfums
Vegetable extracts and molecules for fragrance
Depending on how they are processed, molecules can give grilled, spicy, or smoky effects that bring a salty touch to perfumes. This is the case with Euphorion, a new captive ingredient from fragrance creation house Eurofragance. “Beyond its fresh and aromatic notes, Euphorion has salty facets, almost like dried meat,” explains perfumer Lucas Sieuzac. “It works well with spices but also in leather accords and can be seen as a fragrance enhancer or an umami effect.”
Aside from synthetic molecules, novel natural ingredients have emerged in recent years, particularly from the domain of vegetables. At dsm-firmenich, the green pepper Firgood extract allows to create fresh vegetable effects or the reinvention of green notes. At Symrise, a multitude of vegetable notes, by-products of the food industry, have enriched the perfumer’s palettes—think essence of artichoke with rose facets and asparagus with earthy green notes. But perfumers can also explore more avant-garde concepts thanks to onion, leek, or cauliflower extracts, an ingredient used in Tonka Blanc, a fragrance from the collection Le Potager from L’Artisan Parfumeur created by perfumer Alexandra Carlin.
Tomato notes characterize L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Vétiver Ecarlate ©L’Artisan Parfumeur
In this same vein, the Puig-owned brand offers scents featuring peas, tomatoes, fennel, and beets, respectively in Iris de Gris, Vétiver Ecarlate, Cédrat Céruse, and Musc Amarante. These four fragrances were created by Givaudan perfumer Quentin Bisch, who also created the fragrances Le Sel d’Issey and Sel d’Ambre from Balmain Beauty, where salt takes on both marine and more oriental forms. Salt can be worked in various ways, he explains: “Beyond iodized notes, like Calone, which evokes the impression of freshness and salty air near the ocean, spicy and woody notes are particularly interesting for creating salty effects. Virginia cedar, for example, has green, almost crunchy, slightly smoky facets that can evoke impressions of salt. Regarding spices, those containing eugenol, like clove and nutmeg come to mind; in fact, salt dough and clove are linked in my memory!”
Sieuzac confirms the potential of spices to obtain salty effects, such as essences of pepper, cardamom, or celery seed: “Celery brings an unexpected effect upfront, very salty, which works well with tuberose, for example.” With vegetable seeds, perfumers indeed have natural essences at their disposal, such as fennel seed with aniseed notes or carrot seed, which is used to create iris notes in perfumes. In other words, working with vegetables in perfumes is not limited to creating scents that smell like food.
Technology also allows fragrance houses to create vegetable reconstructions or salty notes. Takasago has a headspace of ganoderma, an Asian mushroom, that perfumers can use, for example, in a chypre accord. With Smell the Taste, dsm-firmenich offers its perfumers reproductions of atypical notes like soy sauce or wasabi.
For Loewe’s home fragrance collection, vegetables take center stage ©Loewe
Do salty fragrances truly appeal?
From a marketing perspective, naming a fragrance salt or sel isn’t problematic but giving it a vegetable name is a bit riskier. Unlike fruits, vegetables are harder to claim, perfumers explain. For Le Potager, L’Artisan Parfumeur didn’t opt for “vegetable” fragrance names, which could have deterred consumers. However, they are present in advertising visuals, on the toile de Jouy-style packaging, and are also subtly identifiable by smell.
Other brands have gone further, such as Officine Universelle Buly with fragrances such as Caribbean Sweet Potato and Afghan Carrot or Iraqi Beet and Egyptian Rhubarb, giving the plants an exotic touch. Loewe has chosen these notes for a collection of candles and ambient fragrances: Mushroom, beet, wasabi, or tomato leaf—atypical ingredients proudly displayed on the packaging.
While vegetables fit into a broader healthy trend, salt is finding an outlet as it is increasingly being used in sweet cuisine, such as chocolate or pastries. Salted butter caramel, chocolate with a hint of salt or chili… the sweet-salty trend is on the rise—and is also appealing to fragrance players. Indeed, several brands claim salt paired with vanilla or caramel, such as Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier, or Juliette has a Gun with its Vanilla Vibes fragrance. For the Mocha Mousse scent created in collaboration with Pantone, Honorine Blanc from dsm-firmenich worked on a salted peanut note.
Both desirable and evocative, the salty register adds an original touch to gourmand perfumes while simultaneously supporting brands’ desire to slightly decrease the sugar level in their fragrances.
