Asphalt Rainbow’s olfactive story, just like Christopher Street’s story, begins with a look at its fragrance brief: the roadmap for crafting the final fragrance. The first rough sketches for this project date back to the fall of 2012. At that time, I was busily prepping the launch of the first CM scent. Consumed by capturing daily life on Christopher Street, I was out day and night shooting photos and video in the West Village. As you will discover below, the idea for Asphalt Rainbow grew organically from that work.
Finding Asphalt Rainbow
One afternoon I was out stalking the old Badlands building at Christopher and West, taking snapshots of its general state of disrepair, along with some great graffiti art covering its exterior. As I stopped to check my shots, the anti-graffiti squad descended on the space, hosing and scraping away most of the art on those walls. Then, in this one beautifully unexpected power-wash moment, the street exploded in amazingly vibrant hues of paint residue (magentas, greens, rusts…), torn paste-up remnants (jumbles of faces and words), and run-of-the-mill daily city debris buildup… a momentary blip of unintentional beauty that stuck with me. But the Christopher Street launch was imminent. So, other than a few rough sketches from what I had seen and a few basic accord ideas from what was lingering in the air, the main concept had yet to materialize. However, my subconscious was clearly hard at work. The amount of street art photographs I was taking began to increase exponentially.
Fast forward a few months… Christopher Street had launched and the number one question was “what’s next for CM?”. I knew our second fragrance needed to be bold to follow Christopher Street’s olfactive story. The next scent needed to have an equally compelling undertone. It also had to maintain that connection to “the real” that guided the development of Christopher Street... to be similarly grounded in shared olfactive experiences. Most of all, the next fragrance needed to continue pushing formulation boundaries by further shedding tired clichés. Though a few other ideas were batted around, my thoughts were still focused on that fall afternoon at Badlands and that unforgettable Asphalt Rainbow.
Asphalt Rainbow in Brief
Following the successful launch of Christopher Street, Charenton Macerations heads back into the city streets, this time blending our disruptive approach to perfumery with the defiant world of underground street art. Inspired by street art’s ability to distort and transform with time, Asphalt Rainbow is a fragrance that rips apart the rose, scattering its fragmented pieces throughout the urban underground.
Asphalt Rainbow asks the question: What happens when a graffiti artist’s spray cans are replaced with a perfumer’s organ of ingredients? Borrowing from street art techniques (e.g. aerosol, wheatpaste, ink, stickers…), the fragrance is an exploration of the beauty of olfactive distortion: a means of defying preconceptions about everyday materials in perfumery by intentionally disrupting expectations of their forms and functions (i.e. the dewy aspect of rose petals ghosting well into the heart of the fragrance). The arc of Asphalt Rainbow twists and unfolds like the lifecycle of a street art tag. The fragrance is a bold interpretation of a rose accord that gradually distorts and morphs over time: a fragmented flower that dances up walls and down alleyways, until, inevitably, fading to background.
Asphalt Rainbow draws inspiration from three key themes of urban street art: distortion, transformation, and impermanence.
Distortion
Street art distorts sensorial perceptions by bending and blending realities. Some street art reappropriates the familiar and everyday, twisting pop culture iconography to craft a new narrative. Examples include WhisBe’s mashup of Ronald McDonald and Hitler, or Invader’s relocated 8-bit video game tile works. These artists disarm us with nostalgia, using our emotional attachments to the familiar to provoke and delight.
To incorporate this same concept olfactively, Asphalt Rainbow distorts the rose, one of the most common notes in perfumery, and the oldest cultural symbols of beauty. The flower is re-envisioned as a street art stencil. Here the rose is a skeletal version of its garden-variety self, yet aromatically present enough to remain recognizable. This deceptively familiar accord is further exaggerated by incorporating the lushness of freshly sprayed hyper-colored aerosols to the mix. What you think you know of the rose is inverted… turned upside down.
Transformation
From simply adding text to walls, to installing more involved imagery with paint or wheatpaste, street artists hijack the original intent of a space for us to consider it anew. Like auto-tune does with sound, molecular gastronomy with taste, and fetish arts with touch, the best street art transforms our perception of physical space. Asphalt Rainbow applies this same technique to olfaction, reshaping the rose at the heart of the fragrance through the addition of scent echoes of urban surroundings. Leaves brush asphalt. Thorns crack concrete. From its glossy petals to its plumy center, the rose of Asphalt Rainbow is dissected — splayed open — only to be pressed into a grittier olfactory landscape.
Impermanence
From conception and design, to execution and eventual disappearance, street art is a performance: a thrilling yet limited theatrical adventure. Much of street art’s true beauty is revealed in how it ages and changes with time. As a piece is weathered, worn, and even buffed away, it continues to provoke through beautifully unexpected connections its surroundings. It ages. It lives. It dies. To recreate this effect olfactively, Asphalt Rainbow is constructed so key olfactive pieces disappear and reemerge throughout evolution of the scent. Rose pieces echo in and out throughout the progression from top to dry. As time goes by, each facet of the fragrance further distorts and transforms until its beauty inevitably fades away.
The Fragrance
Asphalt Rainbow
Asphalt Rainbow is built upon the skeletal structure of a deconstructed rose accord. The rose is reimagined as a street art stencil. This fractured floral form is then applied to a series of olfactory walls — blended with scents of concrete, wood, and asphalt —to reveal different sides of the fragmented flower. To add the effect of color distortion, other polarizing scent flourishes are incorporated like splashes of paint (e.g. aldehydes, lactones, sulfurs). Throughout Asphalt Rainbow’s progression, pieces of the rose fade and reappear, mimicking the ever-changing state of an outdoor tag. The final perfume is a love letter to the street: a roughed up rose that’s been turned on its head and nailed to the wall — all for your olfactory pleasure.
Do You Scratch & Sniff?
To further connect the visual and textural components of street art to Asphalt Rainbow, as well as re-introduce fragrance back into that world, a series of limited edition scratch and sniff stickers were designed by CM Founder Douglas Bender. Each 4×4 sticker, embedded with the Asphalt Rainbow fragrance, is a composite of words and images showcasing the original sources of inspiration for the project. Attach them to any surface in need of scent.
Asphalt Rainbow — A rose undone.
