The Scent of Departure
Cities, bottled by airport code.
The Scent of Departure was created in 2011 by Gérald Ghislain and Magali Sénéquier — the same Parisian duo behind Histoires de Parfums — as a collectible travel series organised entirely around airport codes. Each fragrance is named for the three-letter IATA identifier of its source city: BUD for Budapest, FRA for Frankfurt, IST for Istanbul. The concept honours the sense-memory of transit, that charged moment in an international terminal when the air carries an entirely new continent. Ghislain draws on his background as founder of Histoires de Parfums to build compositions that are genuinely evocative rather than merely touristic, translating local botanicals, climate, and cultural character into wearable form. The project sits somewhere between niche perfumery and conceptual art object, with packaging that echoes a passport or boarding card and an expanding atlas of cities captured in amber-hued glass.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
