Introduction
Perfume is a powerful art and technology, but its secrets are closely held by a privileged few by some counts, there are more astronauts than there are perfumers. As critics have noted increasingly since 2020, those select few perfumers often share similar backgrounds. The Western perfume industry prizes perfumers with elite pedigrees, which often precludes marginalized perfumers. It also perpetuates non-Western cultures, that push some marginalized perfumers into teaching themselves perfumery. But teaching oneself through recreating and remixing existing fragrances presents a different challenge. As interviews with American, British, and French perfumemakers reveal, intellectual property (IP) plays a complicated role in perfumery. Some aspects of scents, like colors and odors, remain unsettled but likely fall into the negative space left by trademark and copyright law. Others, like molecules and formulas, are protected by IP that rarely deters competitors but effectively prevents aspiring perfumemakers from creating and sampling scents. The free culture movement addressed similar problems in other industries by championing creativity with limited or no IP, but the perfume industry has remained largely untouched.
Drawing on work by perfumer and educator Saskia Wilson-Brown, this Article suggests that perfumery is overdue for a transformation. One is emerging: open source perfume. Open source perfumes allow anybody to replicate or reimagine fragrances, which empowers aspiring perfumemakers and the public to practice perfumery. It’s simple. Crafting an open perfume requires releasing public, operationalizable documentation about the scent, including its ingredients and where to purchase them. Existing open source licenses feature terms that enable perfumemakers to reject or limit IP rights in aspects of their perfumes. For those seeking ways to share scents and signal commitment to democratizing perfumery, this Article draws on personal experience to pioneer the use of open source hardware certification which extends the open source ethos into tangible products, broadly calles “hardware,” and provides provides additional infrastructure for forfeiting rights in branding, works, components, and know-how to share scents that are made to be sampled. Together, these interventions can fuel fragrances that are free: free to make, free to sample, and free from gatekeeping. Open perfume ought to be the next free culture frontier, and this Article helps chart a course toward its expansion.