Many cities are getting their own perfumes, but do they hit it on the nose?
Atlanta always tries to look its best, especially when company is coming for a big event, whether it’s this summer’s baseball All-Star Game or FIFA World Cup in 2026. Now the city — or at least its citizens — can smell nice, too, since Atlanta has joined other major American and international destinations with its own fragrance.
City-specific perfumes are a hot trend, a confirmation that a metropolis is fashionable, going places, getting somewhere. In the fragrance business, however, it turns out that the literal scent of a city is not the name of the game. Instead, a layered, complex perfume that evokes a feeling of place is the perfumer’s goal.
At least it is for former Atlantan Kevin Keller, who crafted the new extrait de parfum, Fulton, for his North Carolina perfume house Fulton & Roark as a kind of mash note to the city he loved and left.
The number of perfumers who have delved into place-based perfumes just keeps growing.
The French luxury candlemaker Diptyque creates fragrant candles named after cities, including London, Berlin, Miami and Beverly Hills. And perfume house Bond No. 9 presents itself as an “olfactory love letter to New York City,” with scents created for Madison Avenue, Greenwich Village, Wall Street and Central Park.
Fulton is a bite off a different apple, so to speak, part of a minitrend in fragrances meant to evoke second cities such as Austin, Texas, Nashville, Tennessee, and Atlanta — instead of the big international perfume players like Paris or London.
Steve Soderholm is the perfumer-in-chief and founder of Nashville’s Ranger Station, and knows Keller well from the fragrance business. He has also created city-specific scents, including a Nashville candle and a Waterloo fragrance named for Austin’s original city name.
He views the city scent trend as part of an uptick in locavore devotion for second cities including Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina — “cities that feel like they’re having a resurgence of pride.”
Hey, if you sport a Braves cap and “Atlanta Influences Everything” T-shirt, why not also douse yourself in the scent of Fulton County?
Like Keller, who while in Atlanta delved deep into music at Paste magazine, Soderholm worked in music first, playing in a number of bands. He finds a through line from creating music to creating fragrance — both nonrepresentational art forms meant to evoke a mood.
They even have a shared vocabulary, Soderholm said: In the perfume world there are scent “notes,” and a perfumer’s desk is called an “organ.”
Crafting a perfume, he said, “I think of it as songwriting, just as a way of storytelling.” His Nashville scent is also a celebration of a city that embraced his creativity, whether when he was making music or perfume.
Though he has since decamped for North Carolina, Keller feels toward Atlanta like Soderholm does toward Music City. The Conyers native attended Georgia State University and did stints at Paste and WABE, two iconic Atlanta brands. He moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for an MBA at Wake Forest and launched Fulton & Roark in 2013 with co-founder Allen Shafer.
“It’s just such a rich, complex city” Keller said of his former home. “Atlanta never became less appealing to me or less magical to me in all the time I spent there and all the time since.”
That sentiment seems to attractively align with a changing approach in the perfume industry.
Mark Crames, CEO and perfumer at the vanguard NYC perfume house Demeter, said scent trends have moved away from fragrances centered around sex and seduction to more evocative, memory-based ones.
“Nothing evokes more powerful memories,” Crames said, “than your sense of smell: more than visual, more than sound, more than touch.”
Demeter has made its reputation on what he calls photorealist scents such as tomato, caramel, grass and dirt, which are meant to smell like the very thing the name references. Crames calls Fulton an “impressionistic” fragrance, meaning a scent designed to evoke an idea or impression of place.
Amid its top notes of white peppercorn and black plum, and base notes of earthy, Virginia cedarwood and smoky guaiacwood, Fulton certainly has enough ethereal notes to fill the back of the spacious Ford Bronco Sports advertised endlessly during Atlanta Braves telecasts.
Keller said that certain elements in Fulton such as amber, which “is really fresh and clean and bright” when combined with citrusy, mandarin notes, speak to Atlanta’s optimism and progress while its smokier tones allude to Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and its resurgence.
Saffron, a component of Spanish, Persian and Indian food, is a nod to Buford Highway. The element of the fragrance that may be the most literal is tea olive, a familiar fragrance to Southerners.
So what do locals and nonlocals think of Fulton?
The scent, said Atlanta mortgage broker Clinton Rice, is “smoky, masculine,” and something he would definitely buy. (It goes for $205 for a 50-milliliter bottle or $65 in a 0.2-ounce “solid fragrance” format.)
The fragrance content creator who goes by the Wolf in Lace on Instagram and TikTok spent a few years living in Atlanta and said the hospitality and warmth she remembers about the city makes the fragrance feel on point.
She describes Fulton as “an incredibly warm fragrance, boasting a richness and depth, with a very unique profile.”
Keller, who created the Atlanta-themed scent with a professional “nose” in the fragrance industry, New Yorker Gabriela Chelariu, calls it “a really complicated scent.”
Complicated good, of course, not complicated bad.
“I mean, I think that’s what makes Atlanta amazing,” he says, “is that it’s complicated.”
