The scent of a road trip
Luxury fragrance brand Charabanc believes that the right perfume has the power to transport you on a road trip once travelled. Charlotte Vowden finds out what it takes to craft an automotive scent.
I miss the distance; physical and spiritual. I miss the impulsiveness; where to next? I miss the rousing effect a road trip in my sixties roadster has on my senses. The vibration, the vistas, the vision of my flat cap in the rear-view as it flies off of my head and away on the breeze; I close my eyes, inhale gently, and for one delicious moment I’m no longer here, I’m there.
“When you travel you get a real sense of place by taking in the scent that’s around you,” explains Carrie Hindmarsh, co-founder of the luxury car fragrance brand Charabanc. “Scent can evoke a memory, but it also has the power to transport you somewhere new.”
Engineered with the promise that their aroma will take you on a journey, each of the five Charabanc fragrances are inspired by a different iconic road trip. “We had this romantic idyll of the golden age of travel, of being in a beautiful car, going to explore the world and rolling down the window to take in the air,” explains Carrie, who developed the Charabanc concept with friend and co-founder Barbara Behan.
Amy Shore
“Our fragrances not only feature aromas that you’d expect to find on those roads, they’re intertwined with notes of leather and sandalwood as a subtle reminder that your journey is being powered by an automobile.”
With an aromatic recipe that includes freshly-cut grass, pine, sage and lavender, Charabanc’s ‘Across Pennine Fells’ fragrance feels, or rather smells, familiar to me, but in one whiff of ‘The Golden Road to Samarqand’ – which employs the essences of pink pepper, green coffee, amber and oud smoke to recreate a trip along the Silk Road – I’m whisked away to hot, heady, and unfamiliar territory.
“In Asia, just after the monsoon you get this real hit of fragrance,” explains Carrie. “The dampness brings the fragrances of the environment to life again. It’s nice to think of people doing a commute, a school run or a kind of journey that isn’t so beautiful being transported somewhere like that with our fragrances.”
To create the scents, Carrie and Barbara collaborated with a world-famous perfume house “you know very quickly whether it’s on the money or not” and worked with a third-generation ceramics manufacturer in Valencia to craft the pastille (a type of porous tablet) where the scent is held. The traditional process, which involves a wet press, is environmentally friendly.
With sustainability in mind, the stencilled-steel pomander shell which houses the pastille is reusable. “We don’t want to add to landfill,” says Carrie. Hand-spun by metal spinners in the heart of the West Midlands, it’s also a thing of beauty. A cardboard pine tree bought from the petrol station this is not. Carrie adds: “It has a timeless aesthetic so it will look good in all sorts of cars; from an old E-type to a Tesla, or a Golf, or even a wreck.”
The finishing touch is an artisan-moulded leather pouch for it all to sit within, which is available in four colours inspired by classic motoring: London tan, Orient black, Racing green and Signal red. It can be hung from the rear-view mirror, placed in a coffee cup holder or for ultimate fragrance throw attached to the vent using a built-in stainless-steel clip.
For their next scent, Carrie and Barbara will head to the coastline for inspiration. “The idea of being near water or near the sea is definitely appealing to us because our name derives from the French word ‘char-à-banc’, which, literally translated, means carriage with benches,” says Carrie. “These carriages used to take people on trips to take in the air, and they’d often go to the seaside so it feels right that we should develop a scent inspired by the original purpose of the charabanc.”