Here, instead of the identity, the product design tugs at our sense of smell and does all the talking. The team carefully uses materiality to echo the tone and feel of each scent. “We pick the cap’s materials according to scents – wood for a warm scent, charcoal for a dark one, and metal for the cold. For our new scent, Delulu, that’s about finding youth, we used broken plastic toys that we found on the shores of Hong Kong,” says Alice.
Amid a swelling wave of indie labels launching online, product design has to work harder than ever to make an impression. Unlike identity design, which sets the tone through typography and colour, the bottle itself serves as a more immediate, tactile bridge to the scent – its form, weight, and materiality creating an almost physical prelude to the fragrance inside.
Few brands get this as well as Ormaie. Each of Ormaie’s twelve-faceted glass bottles has a unique, sculptural beech wood cap – and this is where the storytelling happens. In the case of their “solar” scent, 28°– an ode to summer, inspired by a walk in the south of France, with notes of jasmine, tuberose, and orange blossom – the perfume gets a round, white disc as the topper, evoking the sun. “If I tell you ‘white, round, and 28°,’ then you are already in the right space to understand that summer feeling, when you can’t look at the sun that is too bright, which washes everything in a pale glow. When I then show you the bottle, you can almost smell it, right?” asks Paris-based creative director Jade Lombard, the designer behind the project. Yvonne, a feminine “chypre accord of rose and patchouli, modernised by red fruits,” gets a big red cap reminiscent of a rose, while for Papier Carbone, which bottles “a childhood memory; the smell of school,” Lombard crafted an upturned yellow semi-oval, a child’s toy.