Echoing contemporary fashion’s fondness for dad jeans and chest rigs, scent today traffics in two related desires: to be normal and to be prepared. Scent can be armor—try smashing a perfume bottle encased in concrete!—but distilling the lost tooth, the concrete pavement, or the greasy, sawdusty smell of a hardware store also reminds you of somewhere you’ve been and something you’ve felt before. It’s somewhere everyone has been, too; the associations it evokes are in part canny cultural references, but they’re personal as well.

— Read more at The New Trend in Luxury Perfume? Smelling Normal at Vice.