A Reason to Get Close: Escentric Molecules Opens its Berlin Boutique

“It’s like a German techno fragrance,” says Escentric Molecules co-founder and creative director Paul White of Molecule 01, the perfume that started it all for the boutique fragrance house. Crafted by the master perfumer and Escentric Molecules co-founder Geza Schoen, Molecule 01 consists, as the name implies, of a single molecule: Iso E Super. The molecule is thought of as an antidote to the tasteless maximalism of perfumes that assault your nostril cavities and disappear as quickly as they came. Molecule 01, as Schoen emphasizes, is a fragrance that resonates subliminally in the mind from the merest passing encounter.

Just as techno expresses the complexity of texture that one can produce from delicate alterations in a repetitive sequence of notes, so does the repertoire of Escentric Molecules embody the richness of scents achievable from a reduced base of materials. The main portfolio of Escentric Molecules includes the Molecule line (five perfumes each consisting of a single molecule) and the Escentric line (five perfumes that each build modularly on one of the original molecules). The latter, in the words of the founders, are meant to "pay homage" to the chemical base. Add in the M+ line of perfumes that involve a single natural addition to Molecule 01, such as iris, ginger, and mandarin, and the techno parallel becomes even clearer: these are perfumes encoded with switches, binaries, sequences, and antonyms.

Now, Escentric Molecules is opening its first ever storefront in Berlin, where Schoen has long been based along with his fragrance lab. Surrounded by museums, galleries, and cultural centers, the boutique on Auguststrasse feels itself like an archive of hardware: each perfume is set on a moving plinth, with a corresponding shelf that slides out with a video representation of the perfume’s concept (White, whose purview as creative director includes the company’s alluring graphic design, has a background working on the visual identities of musicians such as Björk at his creative studio Me Company). The experimental design speaks to the ambition of Escentric Molecules to ground their boutique in the cultural pulse of Berlin, offering an immersive environment for DJ performances and video art installations that augment the company’s focus on cutting edge scents.

It is a fragrance house, after all; one that has won recognition for its polemical stance in a niche market. As the designer of the brand’s fragrances, Schoen displays a sommelier-like expertise in the idiosyncratic field of scents and smells, speaking with an enthusiastic decisiveness about trends in the perfume industry (likes include subtle notes of incense and mastic, dislikes include natural perfumes and pheromonal fragrances). In this conversation with 032c, the founders of Escentric Molecules spoke about the origins of their renegade perfumery, their artistic sensibility when it comes to fragrance, and the intimate connection between smell and memory.

032c: For those who are unfamiliar with Escentric Molecules, could you please introduce your project as a fragrance house and explain how your approach differs from other companies that are making perfumes?

Geza Schoen: The original concept was to give people the chance to wear a single molecule instead of a complex fragrance consisting of loads of ingredients. Iso E Super, which later became Molecule 01, has an olfactory smell, very faint but mesmerizing, and draws people in. If you wear it on the street, somebody will run after you and ask you what it is. Later it was tested that Iso E Super stimulates one of our pheromone receptors, which is fucking crazy. There had been lots of talk in the past about pheromonal fragrances...

Paul White: Fragrances containing pheromones. Complete bullshit.

GS: ...which is just a fabrication, full stop. Only over the course of me having contact with Professor Dr. Hanns Hatt, who unfortunately passed away a couple of months ago, I learned that he conducted these tests and found out that when you inject the tiniest possible amount of Iso E Super into a singular human cell, the cell started to dance. All of the other chemicals they injected into a singular cell, nothing happened.

032c: So Iso E Super is the basis of your Molecule 01 perfume which is then built on modularly with additional ingredients.

GS: Escentric 01 is a lot more fragrant yet still a very short formula with only nineteen ingredients. It's for those who aren't daring enough to wear a molecule and a very simple smell. For those people, we came up with the Escentric as a fragrance or as I would call it an homage to the molecule.

PW: It's a celebration of the molecule.

GS: For Escentric 01, it was clear I had to go a little fresh, a little spicy, very balsamic, musky, and woody, and finish. The balsamic notes are incense and mastic, the top note is just made of pink pepper and lime, finish. It's very simple. Molecule 01, you can't have something that smells more simple than this. After this is water, if you like.

We came up with five Molecules, five Escentrics. We realized that there aren't any more molecules that would qualify to be used singularly. Then we came up with the M + range, which is all based on Molecule 01.

If you get a hint of something, you get that warmth in that close space, where fragrance really has a place.

032c: Do you take inspiration from previous perfume houses or perfumers?

PW: We look at what other perfume houses do and try and get as far away from it as possible.

GS: Twenty years ago, we were one of the first to establish the niche market, next to the Guccis and the Armanis. I would not be happy if I had to incorporate trends into our own fragrance line. It's about simplicity. We want fragrances you can actually wear that are not overpowering, but smell sophisticated.

PW: For me specifically, if I'm near someone and the fragrance is really strong, then there's no reason to get close. It's a repellent, not an attraction. Whereas if you get a hint of something, you get that warmth in that close space, where fragrance really has a place.

032c: Paul, you come out of this graphic design world and Geza you have a specific, in-depth knowledge of fragrances. What did that meeting look like in 2006 when you decided to start the company in London?

PW: It was a real natural fit. I work with what you see and he works with what you smell. One of the things that I found really interesting is to play around with those cross-modal experiences and to make the visual really talk about the smell. Sometimes we've had situations where I'll send Geza a visual source of what I'm looking at, and he'll find it really helpful in the development of the actual fragrance itself. It’s an iterative kind of process.

Both of us have a final process of reductivism. I will look at something and say is that too much? and start chucking things out that are creating noise and not texture.

GS: It's fun to reduce instead of throwing more in. It's like when you're making food. Ideally you want to use the least products possible and expect it to taste great.

032c: How did you two meet actually?

PW: We have a mutual friend, Susan Irvine, who was the beauty editor at Conde Nast. She was an old club party person of mine.

GS: We worked on the Boudicca fragrance. Then she said I have a friend that works in the agency that does the advertising for Bombay Sapphire. You tell me that you have this fragrance with gin and tonic notes, I think you should meet. So we met, and I started working with Boudicca, which is a very unique left-field niche brand in fashion. Basically every thing they did had to be an art piece. They did gorgeous stuff.

PW: They were the first British fashion house to be invited to show at Paris Couture. It's gone now. I think Brian [Kirkby] designs uniforms for the military...

GS: That's right.

PW: And Zowie [Broach] is the head of fashion at the Royal College of Art in London.

GS: I don't know how many hours I spent creating this fragrance with them but it was always a very creative, very weird process to meet with them. We would sometimes meet until four o'clock in the morning.

I was so impressed with this guy who managed to sell the fragrance to Bacardi, which owns Bombay Sapphire as a brand. I'm presented him the idea [for Escentric Molecules], and then we went to two designers. For some reason, we landed at Paul very late. Even though it was very clear that only [he] could hack it to transform the olfactory ideas into a proper design. So then Paul came up with the binary code as a language for it.

PW: I've said this in the past but it's like a German techno fragrance. It was always something that I was going to understand. I had a lot of experience working with DJs, musicians, and techno labels, doing brand label identities and as soon as Geza was explaining the idea, it started to talk to me in terms of switches and antonyms. Binaries sort of dropped into my head as being a really interesting way of playing with encoding information into the packaging. To represent this mystery, this elusive molecule that would be there and not be there. That was the beginning of it all, really. The first kind of conversation we had, there was this kind of clear synergy. And then the first time you saw something visual, it was probably quite interesting for you.

GS: It was an absolute playground and a pleasure to step out of where the original traditional perfumery had gone. We were before Le Labo and Kilian and Byredo, but they then helped create the niche market, because they were there as well doing their own thing.

032c: Geza, you’ve talked about how your interest in identifying different smells originated at a very young age. Are there any particular scents that remind you both of childhood, or evince especially strong memories?

PW: That's one of the fascinating things that I find about the sense of smell, its ability to access memory much faster than visual information. Things like old floor polish. I cannot smell old floor polish without being back at school. I used to have a Batman mask made of PVC and every time I smell PVC I think of my Batman mask. Hyacinth reminds me of my gran. When it was her birthday, I would always take her a hyacinth. This particular diesel smell reminds me of ice cream vans. You'd get your ice cream but you'd be gassed with the fumes of the truck. Such a twisted contradiction.

GS: My grandparents had a garden with fruit trees and vegetables and big potato lawn. We'd serve them the whole year. They had rabbits and chickens. There was a lot to smell with all the fruits, flowers, and bushes. As a child you have no paradigm, you don't know what things are meant to be smelt. So you dig into the earth and you grab the rabbit. How nice that a kid is so unfiltered and straightforward.

Visit the Escentric Molecules Berlin boutique, now open at Auguststraße 62, Mitte, 10117 Berlin; open Monday-Saturday, 10am-7pm. Discover Escentric Molecules online at escentric.com