Since the start of the Odeuropa project, we worked with IFF to create several of the scents presented across a variety of Odeuropa’s olfactory events. Odeuropa worked together with IFF to develop scents for Follow Your Nose! a guided tour with smells (2022) and City Sniffers: a smell tour of Amsterdam’s ecohistory (2022).
To share some of the scents developed over the course of our partnership, we worked with IFF to create the Historical Scent Collection, a limited-edition release of the scents the IFF perfumers created with Odeuropa’s scientific guidance. Indeed, these scents were developed via the collaboration of historians, heritage professionals, and scent designers. The scents interpret historic artworks and objects into scents and have helped museum visitors experience these artworks with these unique sensory stimulae.
The Historical Scent Collection holds 12 historic scents:
- Pomander
- Myrrh
- Canal
- *Beuning Room
- *Waterloo
- Hell
- Pleasure Garden
- Frankincense
- Civet
- Helene’s Gloves
- Piege
- Orange Blue
You can read more about the scents included in the Historical Scent Collection Booklet which came with every limited-edition scent kit.
These scents and the research and development behind them was supported by the entire Odeuropa team – especially William Tullett, Lizzie Marx, Cecilia Bembibre, Inger Leemans, Georgios Alexopoulos, Alex McQueen and Sofia Collette Ehrich. A special thanks to Bernardo Fleming, IFF La Fabrica curator, for his dedication to bringing these scents to life as well as Museum Ulm‘s curator Eva Leistenschneider and director Stefani Dathe for opening their beautiful collection to us.
*The smell of the Beuning Room and Waterloo were developed in 2015 by IFF in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) as part of the project, In Search of Lost Scents – Reconstructing the Aromatic Heritage of the Avant-garde led by art historian Caro Verbeek.