In a world obsessed with the extraordinary, scent is a quiet rebellion. It invites us to linger on the overlooked: wrinkled sheets in the morning, still scented with lukewarm skin; forgotten terracotta pots on the windowsill, their plants dry, dusty, and lifeless; sand scattered across the floor after a long walk on the beach, still holding the musty scent of saltwater… Those aren’t glamorous aromas, but they somehow feel more real, alive, and deeply human.
A few weeks ago, I was walking along the promenade of the Belgian coast, past the famous casino, expensive restaurants, and hotels. People were mixed: in age, in appearance, in smell. But something else, something extraordinary, was happening too. As the expensive restaurant stretched on, the same building's walls were also sheltering homeless people. I won’t go into detail, but the contrast might seem ordinary for a big city. Still, something clicked: we artists tend to focus on the vivid, the beautiful, the aesthetically pleasing, but scent digs much deeper. It reaches our memories, both painful and joyful, our unspoken emotions, the hidden past we rarely dare to share.
So why is it that we rarely create from the mundane? Spilled coffee, a glimpse of a stranger, stale bread, bizarre night dreams, dust as the softest indicator of time passing, books we buy but never read. Why do we forget the margins of life, especially the people who live there? Isn’t art supposed to raise questions, to speak for those unheard? Why do the overlooked objects, moments, or people so rarely find a place in our creations?
Not everything has to be romantically beautiful or widely accepted. We can create scents that raise genuine questions about life. These can be conversation-starters, writing prompts, keys to creativity. Sometimes it seems like everything has already been said or done: the classical, the historical, the spiritual, the popular. But those seeking something new, something uncommon, should turn toward daily life in all its flaws and inconsistencies. The moments not usually counted as “happy” are often the ones that lead to insight, glow, joy. Writers don’t only write about beauty, they also confront the so-called ugliness of life, the margins, the forgotten, the repressed. There is meaning there, if we only look more closely.
I know, who would want to wear a perfume inspired by doing the dishes? But that’s precisely where revelation can come: in the silence of the kitchen, in the scent of soap, in the background moments that shape us. I’m not saying go and make a scent about homelessness, absolutely not. But I am saying: dig deeper. Every person, every corner of life holds something unexplored, something meaningful, something quietly beautiful.
By refusing to follow the popular or the polished, we start to see beneath the surface. That same wall I mentioned earlier was, at once, part of a luxury restaurant, a sleeping spot for unhoused people, an open-air gallery (with black-and-white photographs at the time), and a public passageway. I can’t help but imagine turning that into a scent—a concept where the abstract and the physical collapse into one: art, marginality, beauty, and the silent vacuum where they meet.
Sometimes I hear stories, local stories from the small town I live in, though I’m not from here. They amaze me. I think about them for days. Sometimes I wish I were a writer, to collect them into one book of small-town tales. But perhaps I can translate some of that into scent. Not all of it, but each concept would be unique. I believe every person has something to tell, however ordinary it is, and each can be turned into a fragrance. Looking at life as it is, without camouflage, without pretension, without trying to please. That’s when the real work begins. I believe people are hungry for something touching, emotional, and honest, even in scent. In a world increasingly divided by religion, race, culture, and class, there’s something unifying about scent and the stories it tells. Art, in the form of scent, rooted in daily life, can make people say, “Yes, I’ve seen this before. Yes, I understand this. Yes, this matters.”
So let’s break it down.
The mundane in scent refers to the everyday, the repetitive, routine, and familiar: laundry drying indoors, a bruised apple, old wood floor. These smells form the olfactory texture of daily life, often dismissed as too ordinary to be inspiring. But within their ordinariness lies a kind of intimacy and truth. To explore the mundane in perfumery is to resist the spectacle and instead anchor the work in the real. It is a return to the body, to memory, to place: a quiet acknowledgment that beauty does not always announce itself loudly.
To speak of the overlooked in scent is to consider the things we pass by without perceiving: the quiet aromas that exist beneath the threshold of attention—faint traces of cardboard, sunlit dust, musty water, or the inside of a wool sweater. These are not scents that demand admiration or evoke grandeur, yet they are deeply tied to memory and mood. The overlooked includes moments, materials, and emotions that go unsensed not because they are absent, but because we’ve learned to filter them out. To bring them into a fragrance is to sharpen perception, to dignify the unnoticed and recognize how much of life unfolds beyond conscious registration.