What are ‘fantasy notes’? Inside perfume’s weirdest new obsession

There is a kitten asleep on your wrist. Curled around your neck. Soft fur brushing against your skin as you sleep. It smells of warm dust and milk, of a sunbeam moving slowly across the bedsheets. Somewhere beyond the door, breakfast is toasting, tea is brewing. The morning is cosy and glowing. You open your eyes.

There is no kitten. Your landlord doesn’t allow pets. There is no bedroom, even – you’re at a desk, mid-afternoon, in a city somewhere busy. What is real is an accord: a blend of aroma chemicals sprayed from a bottle labelledCalico, by fragrance brand nostos.

Welcome to the world of fantasy notes: perfume’s most intriguing obsession. “A fantasy note is typically an accord made by a perfumer to reflect something that isn’t commonly found in traditional fragrance,” says Jackie Mayol, founder ofnostos, whose other fragrances bottle ‘wet concrete’ and ‘cold metal’. Rather than being extracted directly from nature, these accords are constructed to evoke imagined, abstract or unconventional scents. “They really deepen the storytelling of the fragrances and help consumers conceptualise the world that we’re bringing them into.”

Fantasy notes aren’t new – perfume has always been an art of conjuring. Amber, one of the most familiar notes in perfumery today, isn’t extracted from fossilised amber at all: it’s a fantasy accord, developed in the late 19th century from materials like labdanum, benzoin and vanilla to evoke the stone’s warm, golden character.Rose, too, is often reconstructed in perfumery through a blend of natural extracts and synthetic aroma molecules rather than coming from a single flower.

The difference is that many of perfumery’s familiar fantasies – marine, leather, musk – were broad and atmospheric, more of a vibe than a memory or emotion. Now, fantasy notes are increasingly being used to evoke far more specific, sometimes bizarre concepts. Take the ‘pool toy’ accord in Vacation by Vacation, designed to conjure sun-warmed plastic and chlorinated pool water. Elsewhere, perfumers are reaching for doll heads, latex, credit cards, drugs and animalic accords.

“A fantasy note can be based on something that’s real or something that doesn’t exist,” says Amelia Rose, the perfumer behind Faux Rose, whose own scents conjure pearl necklaces, satin sheets and Italian sponge cake. “I’m always collecting visual references and tactile inspiration until a concept feels fully formed, then I start matching each aroma chemical to a colour, texture, or mood that resonates with me,” she says. “I like to exaggerate certain facets so it becomes almost Disneyfied, like with a red rose accord I’ll add plummy and metallic materials to make it feel thornier, darker and more dramatic.”

Christopher Bull, perfumer at his eponymous CBCB, has also created fantasy notes, from latex to metal, in his fragrances. “I think a lot of perfumery is essentially an exercise in translation,” he says. Take wet concrete, for instance. “I wouldn’t start by asking ‘what does concrete smell like?’ I’d break down the experience of encountering it: the dusty, mineral quality of the concrete itself, the dampness, the smell of rain, something metallic or cold, that earthy note that shows up when something dry goes wet. A material can be doing almost none of that in isolation and still be essential once it’s sitting next to the others. That’s the part I find most interesting: you’re not reproducing an object, you’re constructing a perception of it.”

Perfumery has been able to eavesdrop on the living world for decades, using headspace technology to analyse the scent molecules released by a flower without cutting it. Once taken into the wild to record the scent of rare and endangered flora, the technique can theoretically be used on almost anything: a living animal, a fabric, a room. But now, the possibilities are being pushed further. “What if one day we could capture and recreate an exact scent memory that we can keep forever?” Rose asks.

So, why has fragrance abandoned smelling conventionally ‘nice’ in favour of smelling specific – bottling a Tuesday from your childhood? Or a technological rainforest from the future? “In today’s chaotic world, we’re all craving a bit of escapism even if just for a quick hit of temporary relief,” Mayol says. Fantasy notes are the fragrance industry’s answer to the nostalgia edit, or the Pinterest board of a life you’re not yet living, a way of pulling the past or future into the present. “A lot of people are now wearing perfume as expressions of their inner selves and as reminders of the memories that make up their lives instead of for external validation,” Mayol adds.

The perfumer, then, must translate that subjective memory into an experience that can be shared collectively. “Smell memory is deeply personal,” Bull says. “Everyone has their own version of ‘water’: mud after rain, mist on grass, concrete after a sun shower. You’re not really building an objective, accurate version of a thing, you’re identifying the signals that make it recognisable to someone else. So for me it’s never really ‘how do I make this smell like X.’ It’s ‘what does X make me feel, and what can I use to build that feeling?’”

The storytelling of scent has become a cornerstone of fragrance culture, particularly as so many people now encounter perfumes online before they ever smell them in person. It’s part of what makes fantasy notes so intriguing – and increasingly surreal – as brands and creators compete to conjure a world you want to experience IRL. “Fragrance definitely can sell you a dream, but some fantasy notes can also be selling a nightmare,” Mayol says. “Perfume is magical and can take you to heaven or take you to hell depending on your definitions of each.”

While we push the boundaries of olfactory fantasies, we’re also building an archive of everything we suspect we’re about to lose – the memories, the homes, the seasons – in the one medium that requires IRL intimacies. Which might be the real function of the fantasy note: proof that the sunbeam happened, that the carpet existed, that you were once somewhere worth remembering, and that you could be again.

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