Zoologist Squid: The Perfume That Rebuilt the Smell of a Dubai Squid Bone

The water in the harbour basin is black and flat, and one green lamp burns low on the quay. An oily violet sheen slides across the wet stone steps. The air is salt with something sweeter behind it, like sun cream on skin that has spent the afternoon in the sea, and from higher up the steps comes the cold, dry smoke of a church after the last service. That harbour is the first minute of Zoologist Squid.

Céline Barel of IFF composed it for Zoologist, the Toronto house, and in its dry down she rebuilt the smell of a squid bone she had stepped on while swimming in Dubai. It came out in 2019 at 20 percent, and a year later it beat Le Labo Tabac 28 and Frédéric Malle Rose & Cuir to Perfume Extraordinaire of the Year at The Fragrance Foundation Awards.

Three briefs, one week

Zoologist's founder, Victor Wong, came to perfume from video games and keeps more than 200 animal figurines, and they inspire the perfumes. In 2018 a New York perfume shop took on the line, people from IFF's New York office found it there, and they asked Wong to work with them.

He handed over three briefs that had sat on his computer for a few years, and within a week each had been claimed by a different IFF perfumer. Barel insisted on Squid, though people told her nobody wants to smell like a fish market; she could not understand anyone being so literal. She had learned young how a smell travels: as a child in 1980s Grasse she caught raw materials on the clothes of her nanny's husband, home from the Roure factory.

A bone at Nikki Beach

The squid bone came home with her too. It was huge, and she had hurt her foot on it while swimming at Nikki Beach in Dubai, about a month before the brief arrived. She smelled it and found it beautiful: very salty, rawer than ambergris, pungent and sweet, with a grain to it like tonka. IFF ran a headspace analysis on it: the air around the bone was captured and read, so its smell could be built again from other materials. Barel calls the result the living squid bone accord, and it sits in Squid's dry down.

When the brief came, her first picture was out of Jules Verne, a frightening giant squid rising from the deepest part of the ocean. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) the Nautilus meets a squid fully eight metres long near the Bahamas; more follow, and in the fight one of them escapes behind a spout of black liquid that blinds the crew. The giant squid also sent her mind east, to the waters off Japan or China, and that is why the accord needed incense.

Wong asked for more melancholy, more ink and a spicy start. Barel was after a calm mind and a stormy one in the same perfume, a dark mood lifting toward a bright one, and she kept Beethoven playing while she worked, for the Romantic mood.

Squid ink for pasta

The ink came from two places. One was an IFF tool called Scentemotion, which shows a perfumer which raw materials are linked to the colour blue; the other was her own stove, where cooking squid ink sauce for pasta had told her it must smell salty and velvety at once, and she built it from resins and balsams. The juice is blue as well, dyed with a blue, a red and a violet. Like the colour of Zoologist's other tinted perfumes it fades slowly, and some of them even turn another shade over time, with no change to the smell.

The first minutes are pink pepper and incense, dry and slightly cold, lifted by a sweetness close to sun cream on warm skin. The salt gathers toward the heart. Barel made it from solar notes used in large amounts, and they hold up the whole formula. The ink follows, soft and dark, sweet at the edges, with opoponax warming it from underneath and the salt running through it like a cold current.

Barel called the finished perfume a marine amber, miles from the citrus and ozone of the classic aquatics. The end is pale and warm: an ambergris accord, honeyed benzoin and a soft musk, the ambergris and the musk both synthetic, nothing in the bottle taken from an animal. Somewhere inside them, rebuilt, is the smell of the bone from Nikki Beach.

What the whale leaves behind

Zoologist wrote the bottle a fable, and it follows the ink. Beneath the surface a school of squid appears, and the predators that lunge at it are blinded by jets of ink. A sperm whale swallows the lot and dives. Decades later, lumps of ambergris wash up on a beach, a substance perfumers treat as treasure.

Robert Clarke, writing in 2006, set down the part the tale leaves out. Real ambergris, the material Squid's synthetic ambergris stands in for, forms in the sperm whale's rectum, around the squid beaks and pens it cannot digest, and only about one whale in a hundred carries it. The mass stretches the rectum until it breaks, the whale dies, and the ambergris goes into the sea.

A suit or a dress

Zoologist is frank about its own line: daring perfumes, probably wrong for a job interview or a first date. Barel's rule pulls the other way. A perfume, to her, is like a suit or a dress: it can take risks, but nobody wants to feel uncomfortable wearing it. Squid answers to both. Beside the brighter marine and aquatic perfumes it is the harbour after dark, salt and church smoke where they have citrus and ozone.

The ink is the centre of it, velvety and salted, with pink pepper and incense above and a pale amber below. Colognoisseur wrote of that heart as a salty pool of ink to drift in for days.

Chiaki Nomura's Penguin takes Zoologist to the other end of the ocean, also at 20 percent. Saffron comes in on a salty gust of Antarctic air, juniper snapping like gin, then sea moss and pink pepper drift over suede, sandalwood and synthetic musks, and the whole perfume stays up on the ice.

Antonio Gardoni, an architect as well as a perfumer, first wanted T-Rex to smell of plastic toys, the first smell people connect with dinosaurs. The finished perfume, at 23 percent, is a smoky blaze from the day the dinosaurs died: fir and black pepper, a humid, honeyed heart of champaca and osmanthus, then frankincense, cade and cedar, with a leather and a civet that are both synthetic.

Nine hundred metres off Ogasawara

Verne's squid was eight metres long, and Barel pictured hers in the waters off Japan or China. Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori went looking off Japan, using sperm whales, the giant squid's most effective hunters, to choose where to drop their cameras. At a quarter past nine on the morning of 30 September 2004, 900 metres down off the Ogasawara Islands, a giant squid more than eight metres long attacked their bait, and one of their cameras took the first images of a live one in the wild.

Frequently asked questions

Who made Zoologist Squid?

Céline Barel of IFF composed Squid for Zoologist, the Toronto house founded by Victor Wong. It was released in 2019 at a concentration of 20 percent, and in 2020 it won Perfume Extraordinaire of the Year at The Fragrance Foundation Awards.

What are the notes in Zoologist Squid?

The top notes are pink pepper, solar salicylate and incense; the heart is a black ink accord, a salty accord and opoponax; the base is ambergris, benzoin and musk. The ink accord is built from resins and balsams, and the salt is carried by salicylates.

Does Zoologist Squid contain real ambergris?

No. The ambergris and the musk in Squid are synthetic notes, and the perfume contains no animal products. Real ambergris forms inside sperm whales; Squid's ambergris is a synthetic stand-in for it.

Why is Zoologist Squid blue?

The juice is dyed with a blue, a red and a violet colourant. Like the colour of Zoologist's other tinted perfumes it fades slowly, and some of them even turn another shade over time; the smell stays the same.