It all started with a conversation at Guts and Glory; If Helvetica was a perfume, what would it smell like? In unison, they decided that it would smell like nothing. So, Guts and Glory set out to embrace nothingness in a perfume form, Helvetica, The Perfume
“Bottles printed in real 24K gold inks and black on black letterpressed boxes were the appropriate expression of this idea, drawing on the opulent cues of the perfume industry, further fetishizing the idea of Helvetica. We love the provocative nature of the statement: The scent of nothing. This is a design object rooted in super nerdy design humor (which we love.) It’s an idea and a point of view, not a real perfume in the traditional sense.”
We feel that Guts and Glory have embodied the packaging industry, “the power of design to create desire as well as poking fun at ourselves and the industry we work in.”
“While Helvetica The Perfume is an homage to a typeface loved (and hated) the world over, we think the idea of a perfume inspired by nothingness is bigger than recontextualizing a typeface. What does nothing actually smell like? We hope that this product makes people think about everything from the concept of nothingness to the beautiful absurdity of the perfume category.
We are graphic designers who specialize in branding and we are leveraging the power of design to create desire as well as poking fun at ourselves and the industry we work in. It is, after all, just packaging. But as designers we see the beauty and art in packaging. We are collectors and catalogers of these objects which are essentially meant to be tossed after opening”
Why Helvetica:
“Helvetica is one of the most ubiquitous fonts in use. It was designed with very specific cultural reasons in mind: to create a highly legible and completely neutral expression of the Modernist design movement. Helvetica was to have no intrinsic meaning, allowing the content to convey the message. We wanted to explore those reasons and the love/hate relationship with Helvetica by putting it into an entirely different, and quite honestly, amazingly absurd category of perfume. It is in this spirit that we created the ultimate Modernist perfume–a scent distilled down to it’s purest and most essential elements to allow you, the content, to convey the message with utmost clarity.
Target audience:
“Our target is anyone who appreciates design and art objects. Font lovers, collectors, culture makers. This is an object for fetishizing, it is a manifestation of an idea that we found both provocative and also quite funny.”
Designed by Guts & Glory, California
