The Stench Fridge

In his perfume lab, Christophe Laudamiel has three fridges. One for delicate materials that need to be kept cold, one for solutions of delicate materials, and a stench fridge.

The stench fridge is where the stinkers are kept. Some of them are so strong they have to be kept in a bottle, inside a jar — inside a bigger jar.

In the stench fridge there are molecules that you find in gas, garlic, and even sewage, so you don’t open them unless you really have to.

But sometimes you do have to open them. Chocolate and hazelnut scents have traces of foul smells that are necessary to make them tasty.

On its own grapefruit oil smells like orange, so if you want to make a real grapefruit smell you need mercapatan — which smells of town gas. (Natural gas is odorless so it’s mixed with tiny amounts to warn of a leak.)

Laudamiel’s stench fridge is the size of two microwaves, but -he says- ‘if you left it open you’d have to evacuate the building’.

And that’s just a mini fridge, the big perfume houses have a stench room. If you go in there ‘when you come out again you stink like hell’.

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