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Interview: How to create a scent logo for Odeuropa?

27 November 202025 November 2020 Marieke van Erp

Scent logos are mostly subtle signature scents of products or brands, distributed in shops and hotels to – usually subconsciously – convey a sense of authenticity for the public. But how do you design a scent for an academic research project? Caro Verbeek, olfactory art historian, interviewed olfactory artist Frank Bloem, founder  of The Snifferoo about his design of the Odeuropa scent logo.

Frank Bloem scent DJing

Most people have unconsciously smelled logos before, but they probably aren’t aware of it. Can you explain what a scent logo is?

A scent logo is usually a signature scent by which one recognises a product or a brand. For instance, the products by Apple are perfumed, when you unpack them you (often subconsciously) sense that this is a genuine Apple product. Or a hotel lures you to the breakfast buffet by diffusing the smell of coffee.

In what way does the olfactory logo you designed for Odeuropa connect to the aim of the project?

Because Odeuropa is all about scents I thought the smell should be more manifest than is usually the case in scent logos. I kind of ‘deconstructed’ the formula of the logo into individual components, similar to Odeuropa’s aim to open archives and unveil European heritage scents. Therefore, I used the letters from ‘Odeuropa’ as initials of odorants which have historical significance for Europe: the ‘O’ for ‘ozone’ and ‘R’ for ‘rosemary’ for instance. Together these scents blend in as a new whole.

You also selected ingredients such as ‘eugenol’ and ‘olibanum’ and even the highly cryptic ‘para cresyl acetate’. This sounds like the language of a chemist. What do these words mean?

They are the molecules and odour compounds I work with. Some are chemical constructs like ‘para-cresyl acetate’, which smells like horse manure: an important heritage scent for both rural and urban communities. Olibanum is the aromatic resin of the Boswellia shrub, also known as frankincense. The resin is both used in religious rituals, as in perfumery. Ozone is a smell that we sense in the air after a thunderstorm, which is caused by electricity in the air. But it is also the pleasant smell of your electric equipment. As the Odeuropa team consists of a large group of computer scientists, this scent refers to their work environment.

How did you align the scent with the visual counterpart which was created by the renowned smell mapper Kate McLean? 

The visual logo is highly ‘smellable’ because of its smoke-like evaporating structure. It is almost as though the visual logo radiates the perfume I created.

You decided to make the recipe available to everyone, open source. Usually the world of scent and perfume is shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Why did you make this remarkable choice?

Odeuropa is a platform that is bound to unveil the secrecy around smell by opening up archives of the past to a broad audience, in search of the components of sensory history. Accessibility and open source are key to the Odeuropa project. As an artist I too wanted to break with the traditional secrecy of smell and perfumery. This way, everyone can re-create the logo for themselves.

 

Odeuropa scent logo card

Author

  • Marieke van Erp Marieke van Erp
Categories Fragrance Tags logo
New Ph.D. position available in Odeuropa project (ARU Cambridge & VU Amsterdam)
Creating the visual identity of a project on smell

About Us

Odeuropa is a European research project which bundles expertise in sensory mining and olfactory heritage. We develop novel methods to collect information about smell from (digital) text and image collections.

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Odeuropa on Twitter

Odeuropa @odeuropa ·
28 Jan

Looking forward to all your takes on dealing with multisensory data & knowledge! #CfP #SharingIsCaring

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Odeuropa @odeuropa ·
28 Jan

Help make the research of our @PolifoniaH2020 colleagues better by filling out their survey: https://t.co/MXownv5QiO #SharingIsCaring

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Odeuropa @odeuropa ·
19 Jan

We will be hosting a hybrid event in February! A presentation by professor and curator, @Francescabacci4. We hope to see you online or in Amsterdam! All details at the link below.

A special thanks to @caroverbeek for organizing.

#smell #heritage

https://t.co/ylQn4dJK0P

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Odeuropa @odeuropa ·
18 Jan

The team is back from holiday and conference visits so it's back together on Zoom for our weekly catch-up. Today intern Julia Heintz is presenting her work #Mining #IntangibleCulturalHeritage

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Smell of Heritage @ucqbbem ·
16 Jan

Thanks @ninanotman for featuring our research on olfactory heritage @odeuropa @UCL_ISH. It's also an honour to be cited among colleagues whose work is so inspiring. #smellstudies #heritagescience @matijastrlic https://t.co/MeIcauYi2g

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Odeuropa @odeuropa ·
13 Jan

That’s a wrap for @multimediaeval ! What a great organisation and community and what a pleasant surprise to receive a distinctive mention for our MUSTI task!

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Odeuropa @odeuropa ·
13 Jan

That’s a wrap for @multimediaeval ! What a great organisation and community and what a pleasant surprise to receive a distinctive mention for our MUSTI task!

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Raphaël Troncy @rtroncy ·
12 Jan

A @odeuropa tradition now: @merpeltje is inviting the audience to actually smell a composition we made before revealing the recipe #mmm2023 @multimediaeval

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MultimediaEval @multimediaeval ·
12 Jan

Studying smell in multimedia makes a lot of "scents". @merpeltje discusses @odeuropa and the #musti task at #mediaeval13 in her keynote

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Arno Bosse @kintopp ·
8 Jan

My colleagues in the EU Horizon 2020 @odeuropa project have prepared a machine learning evaluation challenge on “Multimodal Understanding of Smell in Texts and Images” https://t.co/xTCBLFIVAM colocated with the Conference on Multimedia Modelling https://t.co/VncVoVngdM

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101004469.

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