this image is not availablepinterest
Hellin Kay

When self-proclaimed wilderness perfumer Hall Newbegin says, "I spend a lot of time with my nose to the ground," he means it literally. As the founder of Juniper Ridge, a fragrance company based in Oakland, California, that creates wearable eaux from plants and flowers foraged during epic camping trips around California and the Pacific Northwest, Newbegin has made it his mission to "put places in bottles." That means lugging a converted whiskey still on mountain hikes, distilling mushrooms, ferns, wood—and, yes, even dirt itself—to capture the northern Sierra Nevada "when winter is right around the corner and the air has a light, sweet smell," or "the incredibly beautiful, ephemeral wildflower bloom in Topanga Canyon that happens in the springtime after storms have rolled off the Pacific." With the resulting collection of all-natural Juniper Ridge scents, Newbegin says, "I really want to take people to a very specific location, and take them in deep."

Much has been made of perfume's connection to memory—an aroma's ability to spark instant déjà vu is due to the olfactory system's cozy proximity to the part of the brain that stores and processes past experiences—but scent also has the power to transport our minds around the globe. A whiff of banana-tinged coconut can drop us on a beach in Waikiki; a hint of cardamom can take us on a passage to India. Because many notes are so closely associated with their point of origin—French lavender, Sri Lankan cinnamon, Bulgarian rose—the essence of wanderlust is inherent in perfumery.

And indeed, the history of the art is itself bound up with great journeys: The attars and resins that were carried along the Incense Route from Yemen to Rome in antiquity, as well as the botanical curiosities that were brought back to England during the Elizabethan Age of Exploration, made their way into perfumes. Now, a wave of new fragrances plays up these associations in particularly powerful and creative ways, leading us by our noses to places we may never have even dreamed of visiting.

"Travel-related scents are definitely a trend right now," says Karl Bradl, the founder of luxury fragrance boutique Aedes de Venustas, who has created perfumes based on Mexican copal resin, which he first smelled in Tulum, and on a flower that grows only in the mountains of Israel (the award-winning scent Iris Nazarena). "The way that smell can take you somewhere else is quite evocative—and people don't just want a fragrance anymore, they want a whole experience."

Scent makers achieve this in different ways. Some, like Juniper Ridge, seek to physically extract the exact scent of a spot; others, like Demeter Fragrance Library, endeavor to re-create what the brand's CEO, Mark Crames, calls "photorealistic" impressions of places such as the Great Barrier Reef and Cuba, using a blend of natural molecules and sophisticated synthetic wizardry. And while Crames's approach is to structure scents so that all of the notes hit at once, as they would if you were actually on location (Demeter's Cuba, for example, "doesn't have a dry-down," Crames says. "The Latin spices, the tobacco notes, the lush green notes, and the ocean are all there at once because I want to keep you somewhere, not move you through it"), other brands embrace the changeability of fragrance as yet another parallel to the experience of travel itself.

this image is not availablepinterest
Hellin Kay

For Clara Molloy, who launched the French perfumery Memo in 2007 with a fragrance based on her experiences traveling to Lalibela, Ethiopia, the act of wearing scent is akin to globe-trotting. "When you travel, you change yourself, and sometimes you become someone else. A fragrance can make that happen, too," she says. "Also, the fragrance itself makes a small journey on the skin, from the top note to the heart to the finale. It's this idea of movement, which, both in perfume and in life, is a way of being free, of going farther, of being curious."

With Memo, Molloy and house perfumer Alienor Massenet seek to convey not just the scent of various locations, but also their spirit. Lalibela, for example, has been a place of Christian pilgrimage for centuries, and although Molloy wanted the fragrance to summon the sights and smells she encountered while there—the churches carved out of stone, the burning incense—she also wanted it to transmit the way it made her feel. "Some places have a strange magnetism," she says, "where you feel both out of the world and connected. I wanted to find that again in the creation of the scent." And somewhere, in the fragrance's alchemy of shimmering orchid, warm rose, spicy patchouli, and smoky frankincense, she succeeded.

David Seth Moltz, cofounder of cult Brooklyn fragrance lines D.S. & Durga and HYLNDS, also widens the lens on geographically rooted scents to take in the mood that he feels surrounds them. For D.S. & Durga's El Cosmico, which was created earlier this year in partnership with the namesake teepee-strewn hipster campground and hotel in Marfa, Texas, he took what he calls "aromatic cues," or scents specific to the terrain—in this case, "that dry, sunbaked sand smell, a waxy, smoky mesquite, a sumacy pine note that's kind of green but also kind of dirty, and creosote, which smells a little bit like desert rain"—and put them together in such a way that the fragrance isn't so much a precise rendering of the place as it is a sort of fanciful abstraction.

"There's something very liquid, no pun intended, about our mind's perception of places," Moltz says. "And Marfa is a perfect example of a place that seems like a gateway to another world. It's both real and kind of unreal. Perfume to me is starting to represent not just actual travel, but a way to access these imaginary locations in our minds."

This is the strategy of Vilhelm Parfumerie mastermind Jan Ahlgren, whose new collection of niche scents is based, he says, on "daydreams" of places and events that may or may not have any grounding in reality. One, called Room Service, is meant to call to mind an imagined moment when Greta Garbo, staying in New York's Carlyle hotel for a movie premiere, "ordered a wonderful meal to her suite and took a bath in rose petals"; another, Fleur Burlesque, takes its wearer backstage at the Moulin Rouge in the early twentieth century with notes that evoke velvet, smoke, and vintage eau de toilette.

Indeed, many perfumers are offering up a different type of voyage, concocting elixirs that transport us through time. And though some older perfumes can act as wormholes back to entire eras—many of the 255-year-old British brand Creed's scents, which have remained unchanged since they were introduced in the late 1700s, act as windows into the long-gone boudoirs of European royalty; a huff of Giorgio can be a quantum leap back to the '80s when the scent was so pervasive that it was banned in several New York restaurants; and we can all visit Pop Art HQ The Factory via a sniff of Estée Lauder's Beautiful (Andy Warhol loved it so much he was even buried with a bottle)—these new scents are deliberately constructed to be olfactory snapshots of bygone moments, as interpreted by the perfumer.

this image is not availablepinterest
Hellin Kay

The standard-bearer of this idea—and certainly the most deeply researched—is Arquiste, a fragrance brand founded by architect and historic preservationist Carlos Huber, who aims to bottle the ambience of historical events. For the line's debut scents, Fleur de Louis and Infanta en Flor, which represent the male and female sides of the 1660 meeting of Louis XIV and his future wife, the infanta of Spain, Huber spent weeks in the national archives of Paris gathering information on everything from the type of rice powder the Spanish handmaids wore to the ingredients of the king's cologne to the variety of wood that was used to construct the canopy under which they were introduced. "Fragrance, whether it's Arquiste or Comme des Garçons or Nina Ricci, has the power to transport you back to an ex-lover or to a holiday or to a city," he says. "So I thought, What if we could connect that personal memory to something that has a bit more gravitas, something a bit more inspiring, something that takes you out of the ordinary?"

For Arquiste's newest fragrance, Nanban, Huber and perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux (who was also the nose behind Tom Ford's exquisite Neroli Portofino) delved into Japanese history, alighting on the story of the last galleon to gather imports from other regions before Japan closed its borders to trade for over 200 years, beginning in 1639. "We know for a fact things this galleon carried," Flores-Roux says. "Leather from Spain, saffron from Iran, black pepper from India, cacao from Mexico, coffee from Ethiopia. All of these beautiful goods are easily represented in perfumery, but we also wanted to create the atmosphere inside of the galleon, so that you can smell the sweat of the sailors, the tar that was used to waterproof the hull. The result is a fragrance that is very, very complex, and very evocative."

If this H. G. Wells–esque approach to formulating a scent sounds too cerebral, too art-worldy, to catch on with the mass fragrance market, think again. Last year, J.Crew commissioned Arquiste to create two custom scents; Huber chose to represent Peggy Guggenheim's 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women, the first all-female art show in the United States, with No. 31, a rose- and vermouth-spiked eau that captures the commingling of cocktails with gallerygoers' perfumes, and No. 57, a cinnamon-bark-and-whiskey blend that nods to the oak walls of the gallery itself. And, more recently, the luxe St. Regis Hotels & Resorts group entrusted the brand with creating a candle and room spray to scent its 34 properties around the world. The next time you check into a St. Regis, you will be greeted by Caroline's Four Hundred, a celebration of the flowers that Gilded Age socialite Caroline Astor displayed at a famous ball she threw in 1900, with notes of roses, apple blossoms, green stems, and light, crisp champagne. "I'm really proud of both of those projects," Huber says, "because some people may think that what we do is very nerdy, but it clearly resonated with these big brands, and I think what really set us apart for them is our strong storytelling component."

There's a natural synergy between scent and stories—both unfold over time, for a start—but it's become something of a trend for perfumers, especially those who work with travel-related or historical scents, to couch their creations in a vivid origin or inspiration narrative. Arquiste scents come complete with a bibliography pamphlet; D.S. & Durga's fragrances are presented with snippets of literature, archival tableaux, and passages from mythology. Because the story that surrounds the notes can be as transporting as the notes themselves, these romantic tales help guide the mind's eye (or nose, as it were) to a particular destination.

Rachel Herz, neuroscientist and author of the book The Scent of Desire, says that the language used to describe a scent actually shapes our response to what we smell. "Definitely, having a narrative given to you by a perfumer changes the way you perceive something," she says, giving an example of a research experiment she performed in which subjects were given jars containing cotton balls treated with an ambiguous aroma. "In one case we handed them the jar and said, 'This is vomit,' and in the other case we handed them the jar and said, 'This is Parmesan cheese.' And you would not believe how people reacted—it was like a magic trick." (Those who were given the so-called vomit jar were revolted; those who were presented with the alleged cheese thought it smelled pretty yummy.) "Context can manipulate perception in a really drastic way," Herz says. "And what's interesting is that a perfumer could tell you about a green bank by a river in Paris while you're smelling something, and another perfumer could describe that exact same smell as being the scent of a mountaintop in Switzerland, and you would have different associations, based on the story you've been given."

What this amounts to is that where—or to what epoch—we go when we smell a perfume is not only a product of the perfumer's imagination, but of our own. Scent in general is supremely subjective: For me, the smell of London would be the acrid tinge of hot diesel fuel and asphalt, the first odors to assault my nostrils when I stepped off the plane as a study-abroad student years ago, thrilled to the bone to be there—but if someone were to wave an eau under my nose that smelled like Earl Grey tea and poppy seeds and told me a tale about Sherlock Holmes's housekeeper, it might evoke a bigger, more limitless and notional London to me, a city of dreams.

A perfume, Huber says, is "like a passport to open your mind and make you think." The right combination of notes can take you on a magic carpet ride, and maybe in the end it doesn't even matter where you end up. As Molloy says, "Sometimes people say that art is a good lie, and that's what we're looking for. Is it true or not true? In the end, you don't really mind, because the story is good. The journey itself is the destination."

This article originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of ELLE.