Edmonton-born Josh Smith approaches fragrance from a design perspective instead of wading into the traditional French perfume industry
When Josh Smith started exploring fragrance a decade ago as a student in the industrial design program at the University of Alberta, he wasn’t a big perfume person. After working in forestry, Edmonton-born Smith switched to studying how the human body interacts with shape and materials in tangible products such as furniture. He became interested in the emotional side of consumption and that curiosity led him into the ephemeral olfactory realm.
Smith chose the name because it captured the sense of rebellion he felt working in the medium at the time, operating as an outsider and blending, filling and labelling bottles by hand. Approaching fragrance from a design perspective instead of wading into the traditional and exclusive French perfume industry gives Smith’s fragrance configurations an unusual touch. The scent Gilded’s addictive glow came out of an exploration of materials, “of the spice notes in the top and trying to create a kind of world around that,” he says.
His design background still comes into play. “I love making the fragrances, but the art direction and visual creativity is also a huge component for me,” Smith says, adding that the artistic vision communicated by packaging matters even more when the product itself happens to be invisible. This season, Smith is in the midst of a major rebrand. Over a decade, Libertine’s bottle has evolved from a minimalist square into a curvaceous flask, with a foliage-embossed woodgrain cap that nods to the brand’s ethos. In addition to encountering trademark issues with the Libertine name as he eyes international expansion, Smith now finds that, “the meaning and purpose behind the company has shifted a little bit.
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