Smelling Like Helvetica Means Smelling Like Yourself And That's Disgusting

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Branding company Guts & Glory just released a scent named "Helvetica". Like its namesake font, this perfume aims to be the simplest and purest perfume ever crafted. Helvetica is intended to showcase the best you and nothing more. In fact, the actual tagline is: "Air. Water. You." So, this shit is just 2oz of water in a nice bottle, for which the company is charging $62 (the bottle is printed with 24K gold, after all)? If this sounds like a big joke or douchey social commentary, that's because it is. I guess we're not over wannabe try-hard statements on marketing and the way other, supposedly less intelligent companies try to sell people products they don't need.

Creator Faun Chapin states, "What we, as humans, smell like, is lovely. [In this product,] there's the idea that we don’t need to alter ourselves or what we actually smell like. Smelling like nothing isn't necessarily nothing ... [Perfume is] an amazing category of absurdity in a lot of ways." It's funny you mention that, Faun, because we as humans smell anything but lovely. We sweat and we fart and we eat gross things and we shit and we fart some more. Humans naturally smell terrible because we're animals. I want to smell like wood or tobacco or whatever the fuck an "Irish Spring" is. And I most definitely want to alter myself, which is also why I don't walk around naked and why I use toilet paper. Am I to assume the entire Guts & Glory office is populated by unwiped butts? Y'all nasty.

Look, I understand what they're getting at here, and, at the end of the day, all they're really doing is paying homage to the most widely used typeface on the planet, which itself was crafted with the intention of letting products speak for themselves without all the excess and novelty that comes with complicated typography. But, while minimalism is good, as this product demonstrates, too much minimalism leads to nothingness and its own recipe of "absurdity" rather quickly. Then again, if this is all just a way for them to put their branding company on the map, then you know what? Good fucking work.

 

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