To many people, perfume or cologne is an essential daily accessory. Although many heralded brands have offered cologne lines long ago, choosing the scent that complements your sensibilities remains a challenge. A cologne scent is entirely different from other wearables; you certainly can’t offer it to others if your purchase turns out to not quite fit your expectations. Therefore, those who wear perfume or cologne experience a certain level of anxiety and confusion during the process of buying their scent. That’s about to change.
Hawthorne for Men uses an intriguing system to help gentlemen (or their partners) release all the frustrations they might experience in the scent selecting process. All you need is just 5 minutes answering a questionnaire, which is more like a psychological test. Then three renowned perfume masters Olivier Gillotin, Quentin Bisch and Rodrigo Flores-Roux analyse your profile including appetite, weekend activities, social situations and clothing styles to generate tailored options. For instance, they found that men who like whisky tend to favour woody scents, thus they would make your specific scent a combination of “Work” and “Play” cologne.
As labelled, “Work” and “Play” should pretty much cover most of the contexts of one’s daily life. “Work” and “Play” cologne lines have five broad categories respectively that include smoky wood, fresh wood, citrus, aquatic and fougère. Therefore you might be receiving your crisp and natural aquatic “Work” cologne by Olivier Gillotin, at the same time having the refreshing citrus “Play” cologne by Rodrigo Flores-Roux composed by grapefruit, mandarin and neroli with a wood base. And of course, it is also possible that you could receive the barbershop reminiscent fougère cologne by Quentin Bisch with vanilla and black pepper pervading. If you do not like what they have paired for you, they would be happy to swap blends until you find the perfect solution.
Upholding the approach of “simplifying cologne-buying”, the two founders of Hawthorne for Men, Phillip Wong (designer & creative consultant of Hood By Air) and Brian Jeong (product manager of BCG Digital Ventures) have combined a bit of fun and science to solve scent selection anxiety. Along the way, they have turned a young professional gentlemen’s search for their defining scent into a reasonably straightforward yet professional experience.
After all, if a scent is worn to please others, then certainly the first one to be pleased should be yourself.
