Libertine Fragrance founder finds scent success through a grounded approach to perfume

When Josh Smith started exploring fragrance a decade ago as a student in the industrial design program at the University of Alberta, he wasn’t a big perfume person. After working in forestry, Edmonton-born Smith switched to studying how the human body interacts with shape and materials in tangible products such as furniture. He became interested in the emotional side of consumption and that curiosity led him into the ephemeral olfactory realm. “It felt like there was a lot of room to play with the stories and the associations that come out when you’re developing a fragrance,” he says of the project that eventually became his niche brand Libertine.
Smith chose the name (a term for a person who seeks out life’s sensual pleasures with abandon) because it captured the sense of rebellion he felt working in the medium at the time, operating as an outsider and blending, filling and labelling bottles by hand.
Approaching fragrance from a design perspective instead of wading into the traditional and exclusive French perfume industry gives Smith’s fragrance configurations an unusual touch. The scent Gilded’s addictive glow came out of an exploration of materials, “of the spice notes in the top and trying to create a kind of world around that,” he says. Eros Fig is the tension between juicy berry flesh while also being pungently and unexpectedly green, whereas Lucky Days is “quite a pure expression of a moment, for me. ‘Sunny’ isn’t the right word – but maybe ‘light-filled.’”
Over time, fragrance fans begin to recognize what typifies the style of certain perfumers, like a fingerprint. Even Smith’s early compositions (such as the mellow patchouli vanilla Sex & Jasmine, or Grasslands, an aromatic Prairies-inspired cologne that conjures the vast landscape with notes of dry cinnamon and freshly bundled hay) reflect the brand’s characteristic nuance: smelling grounded. “I use a ton of resins in them,” Smith says. He does this to deliberately impart a weightiness, the opposite of the recent movement toward the light and air of barely-there scents. “My work is denser and more rooted in the real world.”
His design background still comes into play. “I love making the fragrances, but the art direction and visual creativity is also a huge component for me,” Smith says, adding that the artistic vision communicated by packaging matters even more when the product itself happens to be invisible.
This season, Smith is in the midst of a major rebrand. Over a decade, Libertine’s bottle has evolved from a minimalist square into a curvaceous flask, with a foliage-embossed woodgrain cap that nods to the brand’s ethos. In addition to encountering trademark issues with the Libertine name as he eyes international expansion, Smith now finds that, “the meaning and purpose behind the company has shifted a little bit.” In the new year, the indie perfume house will become known as Paraphrase to convey the act of olfactory translation. “It’s still really about appreciating the senses,” he says. “And living an embodied life.”
For more, visit libertinefragrance.ca.