What does freshly shampooed crotch smell like? Sara Frigerio, manager of the Avery perfume store in Milano, can tell you. She was in Johannesburg last week to give locals a sense of the emotions that smells can evoke.
"This one smells like a walk in a dark, dank forest," she says in her heavily Italian-accented English. "The shampooed genitalia is not one of our bestsellers, but some people like it."
She hands me a strip of paper she has just sprayed. I find the smell nauseating - a mix between something faintly sexual and the overwhelming sanitary scent of hospital disinfectants. It is one of the S-Perfume brand's signature smells.
S-Perfume was created by the artist and sculptor Nobi Shioya (known as Sacre Nobi) as a "pop and urban-spirited range with an experimental direction". Each fragrance is concocted by a top perfumer to reflect Shioya's obsession with sex, the quest for love, and a passion for nature and art.
Frigerio is introducing a few of the ranges sold at the Avery shop. They are represented by the Intertrade Group, a global platform for perfume research, and are rare, unique and expensive. The group says it is "in antithesis to the mass market, bringing together the world of art perfumery in the search for contemporary forms of expression".
Frigerio's presentation at South African Fashion Week last week centred on the group's current project: Unscent-love Magic Potions.
Eight of the greatest international noses were tasked with finding the ultimate scent of passion to create a multisensory voyage of seduction that combines fragrance, art and literature.
The perfumers hand-picked by the founders of the Intertrade Group to develop signature scents were Cécile Hua, Ralf Schwieger, Cyrill Rolland, Celine Ripert, Christian Vermorel, Alex Lee, Arturetto Landi and Vanina Muracciole.
Each "nose" wrote an essay about the inspiration that accompanies the scent. Titles for the scents include Love Addiction by Landi and Sweat and Tears by Hua "because love always brings both: the cold sweat of apprehension, the shared sweats of lovemaking, tears of joy, tears of rage, and I envisioned a juice that would show the raw power of love, but also would capture the intimacy of it all".
Each smell presented by Frigerio reveals the power they have to evoke nostalgia, excitement, joy, revulsion and even a sense of a place.
- For more information see www.intertradeurope.com
Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package. 
