The Discreet Charm of .Oddity Fragrance

When the Russia-born, Hong Kong-based designers Kirill Runkov and Alice Mourou decided to create a perfume line, they had no interest in the standard promises of the fragrance and beauty industry. “We’re not trying to do a perfect ideal picture of anyone or anything,” says Mourou over Zoom. “We’re not trying to say, ‘Spray this perfume and you will feel beautiful.’ We don’t want to promise you anything you can achieve or become or that you can be somewhere.”

As such, the brand has no influencer marketing or any of the classic purchase draws, namely celebrity mascots and fashion house associations. Instead, the couple—who also run the conceptual design and branding studio .Oddity—zeroed in on capturing flaws, the strange details of the everyday, and our own imperfections. “We always wanted to do something as a playground, lowering the boundaries between visual work and other culture work and the other senses,” says Mourou. “Simply making your own product is an endgame for any designer,” grins Runkov.

Their first scent, Naked Dance, was a rumination on pandemic living. “It’s about intimate experiences within your own space during the time when people were tied to their apartments when no one was watching,” says Runkov. Notes of green tea and rice (items found on a table at home); flowers left out, the water unchanged and musty; and the oils and creams that make up home comforts come together in a layered, warm skin scent developed by the legendary perfumer Mark Buxton, known for his work at Comme des Garçons and Le Labo. (Buxton and his collaborator, the young talent David Chieze, are also the noses behind future .Oddity scents.) The bottle was topped with a piece of driftwood fossilized in epoxy resin to allude to the fragrance’s woodsy notes. “We want to make sure when you look at the bottle itself—not just the box but the bottle in the store—you can have an idea of what it would be,” explains Mourou. The design also requires that the bottles be crafted by hand, which was a bonus. Driftwood was sourced on the beach, through factory deadstock, and from leftover Christmas trees gifted from friends; the team made the caps themselves. “We want to keep handmade production and limit our capacity,” says Mourou. “We quite like that idea to be niche, to be hard to access, to be something overlooked.”

After Naked Dance came Dead Air (meant to evoke “everything dark”); Resonant, a reflection of the cold, sharp, and metallic; then finally the bright, colorful Delulu, a nod to a kid playing in the sand and the feeling of growing up and losing the easy, carefree moods of childhood. “Delulu was a big step away from minimalism,” muses Runkov. “The whole concept of the scent is much younger: it’s big, it’s juicy, it’s sour, nothing like our core ones.”

That the fragrance also nods to sustainability was a coincidence. The pair came to the idea of lost toys and ended up scavenging the beach for plastic for the bottle tops. “We don’t want to say we’re sustainable, because it’s going to be a lie,” says Mourou. “Perfume is something you need to ship, you have a lot of components. But we want to do something good and we want to do something to be proud of. We don’t want to create another thing you use and throw away. When you buy the bottle, and even if you use it all, you still don’t want to throw it away. You can keep it on your shelf.”

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