On The Scent… of NEWS: our round-up of fragrant excitement. (And yes, we have bananas.)
Kicking off a regular round-up of events, campaigns, pop-ups and other excitement, to keep your finger on the pulse of all things fragrant. WORDS: Jo Fairley
New kid on the block fragrance house IDIOM pops up in Soho
For their second Soho pop-up, IDIOM (above) – who debuted with a collection of seven scents designed for layering – can be found on Great Windmill Street. As they put it, in the IDIOM line-up there are ‘127 combinations. One you.’ If you’re spoiled for choice, however, let us steer you towards our particular favourites in the refreshingly well-priced line-up, Palo Santal – ‘creamy sandalwood, cool air, woody warmth… soft lactonic notes with a whisper of smoke, spice and smooth skin. guatemalan cardamom’ – and Vetiver Ace, ‘dry earth after rainfall, whispers of smoke, cut grass.’
And do be sure to try the 3D Amplifier, which can be layered with any of their scents (and, sssssh, any of your own) to extend its life on skin. Really works.
33 Great Windmill Street, London W1D 7LR (open Monday to Saturday 12-7pm, Sunday 12-5pm)
idiomfragrances.com
The wild bunch lands at Liberty to celebrate Granado’s banana-powered launch
Yes, they have bananas at Liberty
The Brazilian rising star fragrance house Granado began its British journey with a pop-up at Liberty – and now, they’ve popped up again on the grandest scale, with a banana-themed display reaching skywards in the atrium of this always-entertaining, perenially stylish department store.
One of the biggest trends in perfumery right now – as we report in The Scentscape, in On The Scent’s second issue (find it here) is for banana, as a fragrance note. (And it’s more wearable than you’d think.) Celebrating the launch of Granado’s Yes, Nos Temós Banana! (a definite contender for wackiest fragrance name of 2026) is this slice of Brazilian escapism in W1. You really can’t miss the nostalgic sunshine-yellow signage, the nostalgic cologne bottles (which reference the brand’s apothecary past in Rio de Janeiro, or the chance to try the fragrance itself. It runs through July, so you’ve plenty of time to samba down to the store.
Liberty, Regent Street, London, W1B 5AH
The MANE garden at Rose St. Jean, near Grasse
MANE’S experimental Grasse garden
Grasse has long been the heartland of French fragrance production, with names like CHANEL and Dior famously owning their own fields in which to raise and harvest ingredients for their most upscale scents.
Now, leading fragrance and flavour house MANE has joined them, creating a new experimental garden developed with perfume plantsman Sébastien Rodriguez.
At Rose St. Jean (the aptly-named location), the project sets out to protect and preserve some of the area’s most treasured perfume harvests – jasmine, rose and tuberose – alongside research into next-generation fragrance raw materials, allowing MANE scientists and agronomists to explore ways in which soil and climate impact on fragrance, while developing new hybrids for their scent potential.
It’ll also allow for further experimentation with cutting-edge processes such as JUNGLE ESSENCE – which we’ve seen MANE perfumer Véronique Nyberg demonstrate, capturing the scent of black pepper with her portable, not-much-bigger-than-a-coffee-pot JUNGLE ESSENCE equipment in a restaurant setting before our very eyes – the olfactory equivalent of an image being freeze-framed. Riveting.
Game, scent and match to Lush (and to Billie Jean)
Billie Jean King asks: ‘If you could bottle Wimbledon, what would it smell like?’ A combination of cut grass and flowers, perhaps unsurprisingly – but to conjure it up, she partnered with Barclays and EveryHuman’s AI-guided scent exploration platform to bottle that smell, naming it – as users of the technology are able to do – Pressure Is A Privilege, in her case. (Not the strangest scent name we’ve ever heard, or even the strangest scent name in this particular news round-up.) Watch the video of Billie Jean talking about it, here…
Lush, meanwhile, have their own ideas about the quintessential Wimbledon scent – see above for the tennis ball-shaped bath bomb limited edition, which reappears each year for the duration of the tournament and is available now at Lush Wimbledon (and from 7th July at their London flagship on Oxford Street). Combining orange and tangerine oils for an uplifting aroma that is ‘as refreshing as a summer day on Centre Court,’ it can’t promise to improve your forehand but is nevertheless seriously zingy and mood-boosting.
£5 at Lush Wimbledon