After Don't Panic talked to YACHT about their 'Utopia' fragrance last week, I got to thinking about the wonderful world of perfumery and how utterly bonkers it can be. Smell is the sense most intimately linked with memory (because the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, whatever that means), evoking snatches of the past in a creepily vivid way. But some of the following smells beg the question, what sort of situations do these perfumers think I've been in? Let's hope these companies were thinking more about novelty and less about nostalgia inducing capabilites when creating these bottles of intrigue. 

Scent of Apple

Australian art ensemble Greatest Hits have commissioned the scent of a newly purchased Macbook Pro for their upcoming exhibition in Melbourne. The challenge was taken on by Air Aroma, who I'm pretty sure are one of those companies that try and subliminally smell-fuck you in supermarkets. Anyway, they concentrated specifically on the ritual of 'unboxing' your new Apple product, and the fragrance contains hints of glue, plastic, rubber, paper and snobbery. I may have made that last one up. 

In the Library

CB perfume (brainchild of Christopher Brosius, who proudly proclaims "I hate perfume"), have produced a set of scents characterised by different experiences. 'In the Library' is one of these, and it tries to mimic the ritual of opening up a much loved book and breathing in deeply. Not only does this sound warm and comforting, but it was probably a hell of a lot more complicated to make than you'd think - in this video some guy from Abe books explains just why old books smell as lovely as they do. Thankfully this is purely a smell-based experience, and the feeling of having a librarian's eyes boring into the back of your head is not included.

Intimate Odours

Apparently scents that you usually spend days trying to air out of your room after a one night stand are rather appealing to some people. Firstly, there's the infamous VULVA Original fragrance, that does exactly what it says on the bottle. "After an uncountable test series with a variety of vaginal aromas of all kinds of women" these guys settled on the perfect sensory onslaught of intimacy. Or grossness, depending on your outlook. In a similar vein, upmarket smell perverts Etat Libre d’Orange have created 'Secretions Magnifiques' which provides the aroma of blood, sweat, semen and saliva for that perfect post-coital feeling (well, depending on your sex life). The 'blood' is particularly disturbing as it suggests the demographic of those who enjoy the smell of the bedroom after a heady evening is closely aligned with the vampirically inclined.

Burger King Bodyspray

For a limited time only the meat grilling behemoth Burger King went ahead and made it's very only fragrance - the evocatively named 'Flame'. Billed as "the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat" and therefore probably not a million miles away from what any can of Lynx smells like, it retailed for a mere $3.99. Useful if you want to bag yourself a cannibal lover or you like making vegans vomit.

Demeter's Library of Scents

Demeter are undoubtedly the kings of the weird smell bottling industry, their website detailing a plethora of insane examples. To name a few, you can pocket the fragrance of a funeral home, paint, rubber, a riding crop, sawdust, a stable and suntan lotion. They even boast the enigmatic 'This is Not a Pipe' redolence, which just smells like a pipe. Magritte would most certainly approve. Also available in body massage oil, just in case you want to get down and dirty. And I mean dirty.

What fragrance would you most like to see for sale?