United Scents of America is a small company offering fragrances dedicated to the various United States of America. For its debut in 2011, United Scents rolled out an initial line of five fragrances: New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, and Texas. The company’s press release states, “Everyone comes from somewhere, has a sense of belonging and calls some place home. United Scents of America is meant to to evoke nostalgia for the individual United States of America.”
The idea of location-inspired fragrances is nothing new, but it still seems to have plenty of “mileage”: from classic evocations of the City of Light, like Yves Saint-Laurent Paris (and, even earlier, Midnight in Paris) to the recent airport-coded creations of The Scent of Departure, we’re offered opportunities to fantasize and to remember through travel-oriented fragrances. Even smaller houses like Bourbon French have focused on their scents of their hometowns (such as New Orleans). Of course, the tricky thing about this genre is that every person has his or her individual memories and expectations linked to a particular place.
Let’s start with New Jersey, where I was born, grew up, and have resided on and off for a significant percentage of my life…