The Smell OF MONEY

Globally, ingredients for most perfumes are often imported from small suppliers in Africa, processed, and then re-exported into the commercial market of their country of origin as the finished product. Now, the continent is beginning to look inward to explore and support ways that local production can be encouraged in furthering the olfactory story of Africa.

- ALASTAIR HAGGER

TO BREATHE the heady scent of red soil after heavy rainfall is to understand that even the African air itself can smell like heaven. But for hundreds of years, Africa has also been sharing its evocative fragrance ingredients with the world: fresh, sour orange blossoms from the north; warm and woody myrrh from the east; musky hyraceum (Africa Stone) from the south; floral, sugary ylang-ylang from the west.

The global perfume industry is worth around $50 billion, and is dominated by the Western fragrance titans we see glamorously and beguilingly advertised in every multiplex pre-movie advertising segment. Many of these perfume houses own the facilities to extract and distill the essential oils and aromatic compounds that comprise your favorite fragrance’s unmistakable ‘accord’ of the base, middle, and top notes. These ingredients are often imported from small suppliers in Africa, processed, and then re-exported into the commercial market of their country of origin as the finished product: the equivalent of me baking a loaf of bread, selling it to you, and then buying it back at a premium, repackaged as a sandwich.

Three market disruptors with African roots are looking to reconfigure the way we think about our relationship with perfume by instead placing African ingredients front and center in their products’ identities, and challenging some of the industry’s unsustainable and environmentally disruptive processes that don’t always smell quite so sweet.