New York fragrance house DS & Durga has released Resurrected Corpse Flower, a perfume inspired by one of the worst-smelling plants on earth. A 50ml bottle costs $270, and the scent combines bog cedar, heady lily and tuberose.
The idea grew out of a bloom in Brooklyn. New Yorkers are used to queuing for pastries, soft serve and sample sales, but in late January the crowds lined up at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to smell a rare Amorphophallus gigas, better known as a corpse flower. Garden staff had nicknamed the plant Smelliot. It gives off the smell of rotting flesh to attract pollinators and flowers for only a few days, and it blooms just once every few years.
David Seth Moltz, co-founder of DS & Durga, followed the bloom on social media and timed his visit for the moment the smell was at its strongest. He described it as “layers of cheese, garbage, rotten fish, death, rubber lily”. Moltz has synaesthesia, which means smells can call up images and colours for him, and he found the stench fascinating rather than off-putting. “I stuck my nose inside and stayed there for a while,” he said.
His aim was to take the most putrid of flowers and see it reborn as its opposite. In his version, the rubber lily bulb becomes a Madonna lily and the cheesy note becomes tuberose, and Moltz shaded the composition according to the colours he perceives as he smells. The perfume opens with green olive, grapefruit, tuberose and green banana before settling into cedar, lily and tuberose, a mix he describes as a balance of contrasts between rot and freshness, earth and flowers. Where the real plant smells of decay, the bottled version is fresh and green, with a primordial edge that Wallpaper likened to a swamp.
Moltz hopes the scent will appeal to plant lovers and to people interested in flowers with an unusual twist. Since the real corpse flower opens so rarely and for so short a time, the perfume gives far more people a chance to experience it, without the smell that drew the crowds to Brooklyn in the first place. For those who missed Smelliot in January, the bottle is now the closest they can get to the bloom, minus the smell of rot.
