A new fragrance brand called 12_things is building scents around decay and urban grit instead of the florals and gourmands typical of classical perfumery. Founder Charles Vickery described Void, one of the brand's scents, as a "corrupted skin scent" that opens with iso e super and ambroxan before shifting into notes of paper, moss and Suederal to suggest someone who just came in from a rainy street. Another scent, Condensation, reworks a familiar "fresh laundry" profile by adding what Vickery called the residue of human life left in a laundry room, while Cold Storage leans into ambergris, iodine and lichen to evoke a morgue. Infrastructure, meanwhile, is built around cold metal and rain-on-asphalt accords.
The brand's London store carries no information about itself or its scents, displaying them instead in repurposed bank vault drawers; buying a fragrance means taking the entire metal drawer home, and once all the drawers are gone, the store closes for good. Its website shows little more than a phone number, requiring customers to text to learn about the scents rather than browse online. Vickery said he designed the brand this way deliberately, as a reaction against perfumery optimized for easy online purchase: "I wanted to fuck with that and make something that was so heavy and inconvenient."