Demeter Fragrance Library is the first company to recognize that scent is your memory’s best friend.

Who knows what prompts scent memories? Is it your grandma’s garden? A special evening in Paris, France (or Paris, Texas)? The back of your sleeping lover’s neck? Or the first cookie from the cookie jar?

Demeter’s Fragrance Library includes over 150 single note or single experience scents as varied as Dirt, Tomato, Tarnish, Thunderstorm, Angel Food and Sugar Cane. These uncannily accurate, yet exceedingly wearable fragrances, offer the customer a choice of original and unique scents not seen before. This creates a meaningful, entertaining and engaging interactive experience at the retail level. It’s hard to leave the Demeter counter without a smile and a purchase.

The Demeter Fragrance Library collection was started in 1996. It began with a handful of favorite smells - Dirt, Tomato, Grass and a few others. Demeter started on a family farm in Pennsylvania so many of the scents were inspired or derived right from the garden and the fields and woods surrounding the farm. Over the years as the collection was expanded and the company grew, more scents drawn from life, art, reading, travel and quite a few customer requests were added. Now there are over 150 fragrances in the Library Collection and more than 1200 in the company archive - and Demeter is perpetually at work on more.

Expanding the accessibility and daily usage of fragrance in and for everyday living is a core part of the mission of the Fragrance Library. Demeter beleives that a single note and single experience fragrances encourage everyday use. A person's fragrance "wardrobe" should include more than just designer or classic perfumes. Having a fragrance wardrobe of just designer perfumes is like having a wardrobe of nothing but ballgowns - beautiful but not what you might want for everyday life. You need the comfortable clothes as well.

Demeter encourages people to create their own personalized and customized fragrance experience by mixing, matching or layering two or more of the scents from our Library” says Christopher Gable. In addition, in the spring of 2003 Demeter will introduce home and environmental fragrance, designed for use everyday. This philosophy of providing personalized fragrance experiences that are as individual, numerous and unique as the memories of Demeter customers has created a cult following for Demeter Fragrance Library. The fragrance industry has taken notice. Demeter Fragrance Library has been honored with four FiFi Awards (the fragrance equivalent of an Oscar) from the Fragrance Foundation: two in 2000 for Snow and two in 2001 for Sugar Cane. This is a major feat for a small, independent company in an industry dominated by consolidation and major multi-national entities.

Demeter Introduces the “Grammar” of Scent Single Note and Single Experience Fragrances Personalized & Customized Fragrance Experiences Through Mixing, Matching & Layering

The Demeter Fragrance Library is comprised of nearly 1,200 single note or single experience fragrances. The notes perfectly capture perfectly a single scent from an object, such as a plant or flower. Single experience fragrances are build by blending multiple notes to represent a single idea, such as a prepared food, like Angel Food, or a place, like the Ocean, or a drink, like Gin & Tonic.

Traditionally perfumers, who refer to these notes as “accords”, would use them to compose a perfume in the Top, Middle and Base Note fashion. At Demeter Fragrance Library, however, we find that these notes are beautiful in and of themselves. Part of our mission is to capture and make available as many of these notes as possible. Some note, such as Lavender, Geranium and Cedar are refined from the essential oil of the plants themselves. In order to capture the idealized version of each scent, we use only the best plants, refined to present the freshest possible aspect of the plant. Other notes, such as Violet, Sweet Pea and Lily of the valley are made from flower materials.

Still others, when the flowers are extremely rare or very expensive, or the scents are synthetic, like Vinyl, as reproduced chemically, through Headspace technology. Headspace technology is an advanced system that captures and analyzes the scent molecules in the air around the source of each scent, extracting a reproducible formula. Using this process, and their own uncanny sense of smell, Demeter successfully creates idealized versions of each scent, whether isolating a single note, or expertly mixing various notes in the perfect proportions necessary to create a single fragrance experience. Thus, the scent of Demeter’s newest fragrance, Cosmopolitan Cocktail, is designed not to smell like just any Cosmopolitan Cocktail, but like the perfect Cosmopolitan Cocktail: all fresh, just-from-the-vine fruit, imbibed at a consummate place, with impeccable company, at the ideal moment in time; and to evoke the memory of when and where you had your perfect Cosmopolitan. As the folks at Demeter explain, there is a completely different philosophical approach to making and using fragrance:

"People will occasionally say “This doesn’t smell like Dirt to me…” Well, where did they grow up? Arizona? Georgia? The South of France? Obviously then our Dirt isn’t going to smell like dirt to them as it was made to smell exactly like the dirt from the fields around a farm in PA. Sugar Cookie smells like my mother’s cookies and perhaps their mother didn’t clip the same recipe from the Ladies Home Journal in 1963…. It’s all a different point of view and reveals something unique about every person who has a whiff. “EEYUUU! Who wants to smell like Mildew??” Well obviously the person yelling this at the top of their voice won’t, but that doesn’t mean that someone else may very well want to. As a matter of fact I can guarantee that there’s a charming woman with a beach house who loves it - whenever she sprays Mildew it reminds her of the first day of her summer vacation when she turns on the air conditioner.

Demeter Fragrance Library is a very democratic collection - we don’t expect everyone to like absolutely every scent we do. Take Cedar for example - to one person it’s a trip to Morocco, to another Grandmother’s closet, to a third a smelly hamster cage…. The nice thing is they’re all right - you can’t make someone like a scent. They like it or they don’t - it’s as simple as that. With such a broad range of fragrances though everyone can find something they love - if not, then they have no sense of humor whatsoever and should be pointed to the nearest designer perfume right away.

Some of the scents are fairly easy to do; some take months or even years. No scent is included in the Collection, however, until it brings to mind immediately what the name is on the label.”

Indeed, many natural smells, like Dirt and Grass, seem simple on the surface, but are, in fact, very complex. Dozens of ingredients might go into a fragrance experience like the award winning Snow or Thunderstorm. This is where the Perfumer’s art comes into play, and much like words are assembled from letters, and sentences from words, and paragraphs from sentences, so are fragrances built up from single notes into more complex fragrance experiences.

These single experience fragrances, like Snow and Steam Room, do not attempt to capture the scent of a particular object, but a specific time, place or event. Even though these single experience fragrances may be complex in their own right, they are far more accessible, comprehensible and everyday usable than still more complex designer fragrances; the difference between a short story and a Russian novel. Part of the accessibility and usability of Demeter Fragrance Library single experience scents comes from linear design: meaning that while the scent of traditional designer fragrances change on the skin over time, Demeter Fragrances are designed to smell the same, all day, everyday, all the time.

One of the most attractive aspects of the Demeter Fragrance Library is that by mixing, matching and layering various single note and single experience fragrances, the customer can create a personalized fragrance experience, literally “writing their own story” in fragrance. This philosophy of providing personalized fragrance experiences that are as individual, numerous and unique as the memories of Demeter customers has created a cult following at the Manhattan stores, and can accomplish the same in other retail environments.

Demeter Fragrances Recreates Memories

Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture, is the namesake of Demeter Fragrance Library, providing inspiration for scents such as Dirt, Grass and Golden Delicious. Demeter Fragrance Library stands out from the designer fragrance crowd by bottling down-to-earth scents that evoke pleasant memories and experiences of everyday life.

“We create scents that are drawn from memories,” explains Demeter Fragrances. “We want each scent to transport the user back to a special place or time. For example, Bonfire is based upon burning maple leaves after raking in the fall. Golden Delicious is about trips I made to the apple storage room at the nearby orchard with my father.”

Everyone has a personal library of meaningful smells. The memories they trigger are somehow more intense than those we dredge up by conscious effort. It's as if smell provides a shortcut to our deepest memories and brings them back complete with the emotions and sensations we felt at the time. Our reactions to fragrance are colored by our own past experiences, and, experts say, our sense of smell begins in the womb.

"Our sense of smell really does develop in utero," says Dr. Caroline Olko, professor of biopsychology at Hunter College, in New York. "The olfactory system, which controls our sense of smell, is functional at approximately the sixth month, and the fetus then begins picking up the amniotic fluid smells, and food smells. Its sense of smell is actually more developed than its sense of vision. I did a study where I videotaped 60 one-day-old newborns, who turned their heads toward positive scents, yet turned their heads away from negative scents. It's really amazing, the power of scent."

According to the Fragrance Foundation in New York, scientists believe that scent, memory, and emotion are inseparably linked. This is because smells are processed in the forebrain, the part of the brain that deals with emotions and instincts and urges. Long term memories are also thought to be stored here, and the two areas seem to overlap, causing memories and smells to be laid down and later retrieved as one single experience. Our ability to recall what we've smelled surpasses even our ability to recall what we've seen.

"Odors evoke memories that are more emotional than memories evoked by other sensory stimuli," says Dr. Rachel Herz, a scientist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "The link between odor and memory per se, is no stronger than between any other memory cue and a memory event, in terms of accuracy, but in terms of emotionality, odors do evoke memories that are more emotional than memories triggered by any other stimuli."

Demeter Fragrances has successfully recreated familiar and comfortable scents, ranging from woods to greens and grasses, to fruits and, of course, florals. But there are more, including fragrances that capture aromas that do not come straight from the earth, but represent single scent fragrance experiences, like Leather, Cappuccino or Cinnamon Toast. In all, Demeter has more than 150 scents that represent either single fragrance notes, or single fragrance experiences. These have quickly become favorites of celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Courtney Cox, Stella McCartney, Sharon Stone, Kate moss, Candice Bergen and Cher. “Perhaps the fragrances are attractive to high-profile people because it takes them back to simpler times and places, without having to give up elegance or style,” muses Christopher Gable, one of the original owners of Demeter.

Fortunately for olfactory systems everywhere, this exceptional, hi-tech system does not make for exceptionally high prices. Expanding the accessibility and daily usage of fragrance in and for everyday living is a core part of the mission of the Fragrance Library. Demeter single note and single experience fragrances encourage everyday use. “A person's fragrance "wardrobe" should include more than just designer or classic perfumes. Having a fragrance wardrobe of just designer perfumes is like having a wardrobe of nothing but ballgowns - beautiful but not what you might want for everyday life. You need the comfortable clothes as well”. In addition, in the spring of 2003 Demeter will introduce home and environmental fragrance, designed for use everyday.

Pick-Me-Up Cologne Sprays

Our cologne sprays are designed first and foremost to be worn - no matter how odd the scent. They are made to be subtle on the skin and blend with the chemistry of each person who wears them. They can be used singly or combined with other scents from the collection in any group you choose to create a personalized and customized fragrance experience. Simply spray one on top of another to create a scent that’s entirely your own. Also by changing the order in which you spray them on you change the scent as well. Adjustable perfume if you will, that suits whatever mood you’re in at the time. Many people also prefer to carry certain scents with them or keep them handy during the day. Whenever they like they can then spray a little bit into the air or on a handkerchief to make themselves feel better - like modern smelling salts. The colognes can also be sprayed in the air - office, home, car, makes no difference - or sprayed on sheets and pillows before tucking in. They’re all perfectly safe to use on any fabrics - clothes, furniture, curtains, whatever.

 

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