Are you smelling eco-friendly?
Perfumes hop on responsible, sustainable ingredients trend with ‘natural’ fragrances
When the press release arrived for the launch of six new Clean Reserve fragrances this spring, the marketing pitch sounded like a bandwagon: “farm-to-bottle” perfume.
Heck, we already have to worry about the biodynamic and sustainable provenance of our choices in the areas of food, wine and fashion. Now our scents need to be responsible and traceable, too?
Clean Reserve is a newly launched, upscale iteration of an existing brand, known for its simple, “non-perfume” fragrances that smell, well, like clean stuff.
This line of six is vying to appeal to ecoconscious beauty consumers with sustainable ingredients and conscientious packaging and production methods.
Longtime Toronto fashion and beauty writer Deborah Fulsang is the founder of The Whale and The Rose, a Canadian site and now a magazine about fragrance.
“I look at that and farm-to-bottle sounds at first like a catchphrase. But the fragrance industry does follow the same trends as eating and entertainment. And it’s not an untruth: there is a trend to natural ingredients and to fewer ingredients that have a story behind them. There is also an artisanal craftsmanship element.”
When Clean first launched in 2003, it was as a minimalist reaction to the ponderous, complex designer fragrances popular at the time (think Dior Addict, Gucci Rush and Glo by J. Lo). The first iteration was dead simple, intended to smell like a bar of soap. The brand, which expanded to include Air, Warm Cotton, Cool Cotton, Skin, Summer Sun, Rain and Fresh Laundry, now has dozens of “non-perfume” perfumes in its lineup meant to trigger feelings of what the brand calls “unpretentious nostalgia.”
The beauty industry has been quick to address the naturals movement, and pure ingredients in skin care do make sense intuitively: What you put on your body is as important as what you put in your body.
To note: the Clean line isn’t all natural, and it can still trigger allergies in fragrance-sensitive individuals. But it is, as Fulsang says, a nod toward that lightness and awareness that is moving across the whole industry.
Fragrance is, after all, about the backstory: in this case, it is luxury ingredients found in nature. Exclusivity and rarity add to both the expense and the aspirational factor. Take, for example, Sueded Oud, one of the six Reserve prestige (read: more expensive at $125), sophisticated (read: older target audience), unisex “remixes” of existing scents.
Each one contains a sustainable ingredient, and there is little in the fragrance world hotter right now than oud. Oud is a sweet, woody aro- matic resin that is formed by the Agar tree native to Southeast Asia. When Agars are infected by a specific mould, oud is the resin the tree produces to heal itself.
Other natural sustainably resourced ingredients in the line include mandarin oil from Brazil (in Amber Saffron), benzoin from Asia (in Warm Cotton Reserve), sandalwood from Sri Lanka (in Blonde Rose) and copaiba oil from the Amazon (in Skin Reserve).
Eco packaging is also important to the target consumer here, says Greta Fritz, the director of global marketing for Fusion/Clean Beauty.
“The cap is made of wood from a sustainably managed forest in Spain. The products are infused with sustainable ingredients plus some Ecocert-certified sustainable materials. They are manufactured with corn alcohol in a 100-per-cent solar-powered facility and put into recyclable glass bottles.”
Fritz describes the brand as “the anti-fragrance fragrance, suitable to be worn in proximity with others,” addressing the growing movement to go fragrance-free in the workplace and public spaces.
She is also excited about the trend to customization in fragrance. The brand is advocating “fragrance pairings” within the Reserve collection. The Clean website features an app that suggests how to mix and match, “as well as to share customization on social media,” of course, says Fritz.
There are a whack of niche natural perfume brands out there to compete with. California’s Rich Hippie is manufactured with pre-First World War techniques with local wine spirits, Pour Le Monde is wholly nontoxic, made with essential oils, Lurk is handmade in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood and Abel Organics is made by a former winemaker who packages her fragrances in reclaimed wood from Dutch railway carriages.
On the more mass production side, there is the accessibly priced drugstore brand Demeter, which is not about natural ingredients but rather about recreating singular smells found in real life (paperback, Christmas tree, dirt). And at the high end is a company like Byredo, which sells a line of exotic natural-ingredient fragrances (Oud Immortel, a runaway hit, costs up to $300 at Holt Renfrew).
The secret of perfume is its ability to evoke emotion, says Fulsang.
“When you get deep into the fragrance nerd stuff, it is like a passion for wine: you start to investigate the depth and meaning, decode the layers of notes and impressions. There are overarching trends — right now, there is a movement to bring what had been men’s scents into the women’s market, plus a distinct trend to lightness, in both formula and concentration — and you see patterns emerge in fragrance the way you do in fashion.”
But the big trend in question here — sustainability — is likely going to stick around for awhile.