So you want to smell like a liminal space?

If the scent of death could be bottled, would you wear it? Does an empty room have an odour if there’s no one around to smell it? Can you make tarmac into something beautiful or identify the scent of a void? These are the questions at the heart of 12_things, a new fragrance brand which finds a corrupted beauty in the dark, the dingy, and the dead.

Perfume is an art which exists in a space of aspiration and order; scents evoking glamorous parties, decadent desserts or yachts in the Mediterranean, with notes typically arranged in the neat pyramid structure of classical perfumery. But for founder Charles Vickery, perfume is not an escape from everyday life; instead it’s a way of embracing the beauty buried within its dark spaces and grimy cracks.

Two refrains appear throughout 12_things’ branding: “the world does not smell like a garden” and “every act of creation is at first an act of destruction,” as the brand balances a dark realism with entropy in scents inspired by city infrastructure and abandoned buildings that shift and deconstruct on the skin. Void is a riff on the ever-popular ‘skin scent,’ “it has quite a legible top note with iso e super and ambroxan, so it smells like those ‘you but better’ perfumes,” says Vickery. “Then you get notes of paper, moss and Suederal, so you get this impression of a person who has just come in from the rainy street… I love that journey of a corrupted skin scent where you can trick people into it with the top notes.” Condensation also plays with this corruption, taking the ‘fresh laundry’ scent profile we are so familiar with and adding “something of the residue of human life left in the laundry room. It’s this study in conflict, but it’s the one that most people in the store are drawn to.”

12_things’ fragrances act as a commentary on consumption and the perfume industry itself, with Vickery inserting “a campness, a wink to perfumes that are out there already that we then completely fucked with”. Their claim to champion “human scents” embodies this, suggesting the familiar designer scents we love are more inhuman than Infrastructure, a scent with cold metal and rain-on-asphalt accords. Vickery wants his scents to ground us in our real world. “Traditional perfumery is always telling us to escape the world we live in; it wants to take us on holiday, and it excludes the beauty of the world we walk over. The world around us, especially in somewhere like London, is concrete, metal, glass; it’s grey and a bit miserable, but I wanted to turn that ugly brutality into something beautiful, because it’s human, we see it every day.”

All of 12_things’ scents have a distinct human facet, with notes like salt, skin musks and nicotine smoke recalling the human presence at the margins of the construction site, the body on the slab, the trace skin cells left in the locked room. Yet there are few scents that could be more unsettlingly human yet alien than those associated with death. “Cold Storage is one of our more confrontational scents; it’s the smell of the morgue with cold metal and plastic with ambergris, iodine and lichen. It sounds fucking horrendous, but you’ve got this heart of ambergris which gives a human presence because it’s got this saltiness and this zesty lime under the surface.” It’s unapologetically unpalatable, but it’s emblematic of Vickery’s project to “throw together incredible ingredients with scents from the modern wasteland; they aren’t comfortable together, but that’s what creates interest and beauty.” 

Consumers are increasingly interested in weird scents; the growth of niche perfumery has been huge over the past few years, and atypical accords like ink and vinyl are finding their way into perfumes from the likes of Yves Saint Laurent and Tom Ford. Even beyond perfumery, it’s well documented that there is something addictive in a lot of typically unpleasant scents. A lot of people love the smell of disinfectants or a petrol station forecourt, but they might not think they are beautiful, which is where 12_things steps in. “Our minds are trained to view beauty as art or architecture, and yet most of the things we see every day are designed, and they have beauty within them. Mixing these new scent accords of plastic and paper against these really fine perfumery ingredients was a way to have the scents exist in this grey space where you aren’t quite sure what to make of it.” 

This sense of uncertainty is built into every aspect of 12_things. Their store contains no information about the brand or its perfumes, nor does their website. The store is fitted floor to ceiling with repurposed bank vault drawers, which house their scents like mini morgue drawers. Upon purchase, the entire metal drawer goes home with you – the walls of the shop functioning as part of the perfume’s packaging and destroying itself with every sale. When all the drawers are gone, the store will close, degrading over time like the spaces that inspire the scents.

Vickery wants there to be friction at every stage of the consumer’s experience. “We are living in this wasteland where brands are optimising everything for legibility and ease. You can imagine how something smells before you try it; everything is optimised to be purchased and shipped online with small bottles, perfectly rounded edges, all the same logo, same colour palette. I wanted to fuck with that and make something that was so heavy and inconvenient. You have to really want to understand what is going on here.” 

“If you’re browsing perfumes online, are you going to think ‘ooh I want to smell like metal!’… probably not, but if you talk to someone about the scents and try them you might be more interested. I wanted you to have to talk to someone at every point to buy the scents,” says Vickery, who also designed the website to be little more than a page hosting a mobile number. “I almost wanted people to think, is this a joke? What is this perfume brand from Shoreditch where you have to text the dealer? AI is slowly taking over every creative industry, so I wanted this brand to feel human because it is odd and inconvenient. You have to want to experience this perfume enough that you’ll text someone and ask for access to the website.” 

Perfume is often selling a dream, an ideal self, or an aspiration, but the aspirational side of Vickery’s perfumes is their weirdness and their antagonistic pursuit of friction, which shows that strange pieces of olfactory art are still being made and people will inconvenience themselves to try them. There is an undeniable darkness to 12_things, but to find beauty in the places we don’t necessarily want to be is inherently hopeful: “a real point of success for me will be if people start to think ‘you know what? It’s not that bad in the UK, it’s not that grim outside’”. In a world of AI slop and endless perfume dupes, we need scents with hope at their core.