Chess's Next Move is Fragrance
- Zhenya Tsenzharyk
- 36 minutes ago
- 6 min read
In perfume, nostalgia tends to rule: sweet gourmands, memory-laden florals. But when fragrance borrows from the cerebral world of chess, it opens a stranger, more imaginative territory.
En passant is one of chess’s more esoteric rules, referring to a pawn's ability to capture another pawn when special conditions are met. I learnt this mostly against my will when I sampled Frederick Malle’s fragrance of the same name. It dawned on me soon after reading the definition that the title must refer to the French phrase’s direct meaning, passing through, not the chess rule – and yet I found myself captivated by the idea of trying to distill and communicate the essence of a player enacting the move in a game in scent. En Passant was inspired by a spring garden in full bloom, filled with the scent of lilacs and the freshness of vegetation lingering after a short, heavy storm breaks the day’s heat. Why couldn’t it refer to an opportunistic pawn, drawing a parallel between the ephemerality of what happens on a chessboard and lilac’s notoriously short blooming season? In a way, both are passing through.
Though I was mistaken about the connection between En Passant and chess, other fragrance houses have ventured there directly. Frassaï’s Ajedrez, translating literally to “chess,” is a journey to a darkly lit chess room in the 1960s. Tobacco, dry spices, and iris conjure images of a chess player, sharply dressed; the notes of dark wood, moss, and lavender evoke the materials a chess board is made from, the room it lives in. Vilhelm Perfumerie’s Morning Chess situates the game during the summer months in Sweden’s coastal Falkenberg, verdant and succulent, with only an echo of leather and spice. Both are memoristic, elegant tributes to chess-playing grandfathers.
Perfume is not immune to trend cycles. Even its resurgent popularity as a category within beauty is cyclical, and the current boom – though sustained – is likely to dip at some point. Chess’s presence in pop culture is more curious. It’s a game with a 1500-year history, but not exactly a mainstream interest or pursuit, until 2020 when The Queen’s Gambit entered the cultural imagination at a time when, for many, TV was the main source of entertainment. Captive audiences couldn't get enough of the chess prodigy Beth Harmon, with her preternatural talent and dramatic character arc; the show quickly became one of the most-streamed on Netflix.
The Queen’s Gambit stepped outside chess’s entrenched symbology. Harmon was beautiful, stylish, sexy, transgressive, ambitious, an addict, a woman. She bore a whole host of dramatic attributes to find interest in beyond the inherent unfamiliarity of chess, while simultaneously immersing audiences in the appeal and tension of the game. The Queen’s Gambit rendered the closed, internal experience of chess explicit; Harmon would look up to the ceiling to envision her next move, the chess pieces celestial objects she mastered at will. Searches for chess surged as did sales of chess sets, and in an amusing turn of events, The Queen’s Gambit board game was born, a simplified facsimile for Harmon wannabes.
More niche, though an indisputable event in the literary world, was the 2024 publication of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo. The hardcover features a fallen rook, which can move any number of squares in a straight line if not blocked by another piece, representing the protagonists’ tribulations and the freedom — with the right strategy — to move beyond them. An intermezzo, an Italian term translating to “in between moves,” is an unexpected action in the game that disrupts an opponent’s strategy and necessitates an immediate response. Readers of the novel will be able to make the symbolic connection between those metaphors and the narrative arc of the two protagonists, though it’s the humanistic Peter, and not the chess-playing Ivan, who most embodies the cover’s clues.
Chess has long served as a metaphor for anyone looking to explore and express complexity. So why not fragrance, too? In the aptly titled novella Chess, also known as The Royal Game, Stefan Zweig asks us to consider whether chess is “not also a science and art [...] a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new, mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet within unlimited combinations; [...] no one knows what brought it to down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind.” It’s a fitting description for the art of perfumery, particularly when it draws attention to the function of imagination — it’s imagination that connects what’s inside a perfume bottle to its narrative and visual identity.
The high conceptualism of chess and the average nescience towards its nuances can only be a good thing for fragrance. A perfumer could start by translating each of the 32 pieces on a board into individual fragrances or reach for the thousands of chess openings, the oldest of which are named after nationalities of players who advocated for them; all ready-made genesis nodes for olfactory exploration. So many of the most popular scents today, even in niche spaces, over-index on nostalgia and gourmands, the two often present concurrently. Sweet and sticky, they harken back to places and memories stripped of contextual complexity and therefore negative associations. Chess, then, presents a new opportunity for perfumers and perfume enthusiasts alike.
Perfume house Mind Games is putting this theory to the test. Launched in 2022, Mind Games “links the complex artistry best embodied by the strategy and brilliance of chess with the innovative and hypnotic effects of perfumery.” Naturally, the collection is divided into black and white flacons, adorned with a sculptural topper corresponding to different chess pieces. Scents mirror “the significance behind every move a player makes [...] Each note is carefully considered and selected, performing an essential role in the grand scheme, comprising a collection as layered, nuanced, and insightful as the ideas that inspired them.”
At Mind Games, this isn’t mere marketing. It’s a gamut of ideas striving to coalesce into a narrative detached from nostalgia, free from predetermined parameters. By building a brand around the concept of chess and all it encompasses, Mind Games has created an olfactory playground for the perfumers it works with. Grand Master, unexpectedly, opens with rose water, blackcurrant, and peony. The initial softness is bolstered by coffee and violet before the fragrance reveals a robust foundation of ebony wood, myrrh, and incense. Grand Master is unisex – if anything, it leans feminine – the soft, powdery flower petals concealing aromatic woods until a gust of wind blends them. Meanwhile, Gambit is herbaceous and spicy. Cloves and lavender open, leading to a cardamom and geranium middle, while patchouli, sandalwood, and ambrostar ground. I can extrapolate how the spicy opening notes translate to a player making a calculated sacrifice at the start of the game, as the fragrance transforms into a stable, animalic base, the player waits to reap the gambit’s advantage. Is it ontologically true? I don’t care – it’s fun to experience the notes like colours and brushstrokes in an impressionistic scape, conjuring previously unexplored and unexpected associations.
I often think about a 1963 photograph by Julian Wasser of a nude, youthful Eve Babitz playing chess with the besuited, aged Marcel Duchamp. An absurd contrast transpires between them, the game, and the Ferus gallery setting, surrounded by Duchamp’s artworks, including the famed Fountain. I long to know what the scene smelled like. Did Babitz arrive smelling of “swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds,” as she described her hometown of Los Angeles to smell like in Eve’s Hollywood? Maybe Duchamp was wearing classic French cologne, or his suit was freshly laundered for the opening of his retrospective. The gallery must have had a smell, they always do, of expanse, and the recently installed artworks. Why not add a salty, aquatic note, courtesy of the Fountain?
The chess game between Duchamp and Babitz didn’t last long. “I tried my best, moving a knight so at least he knew I had some idea what a knight was, he moved his pawn and the next thing I knew, I was checkmated. ‘Fool’s mate,’ they call it when you’re so stupid that the game hasn’t even begun and you’ve lost,” Babitz recalled of the experience. Sadly, there’s no fool’s mate fragrance, though I’m not surprised. It’s the fastest checkmating pattern in chess, predicated on white making awful opening mistakes, leading to a checkmate in only two moves. Perhaps in a fragrance, it would be embodied by two discordant notes, quickly going nowhere. It wouldn’t smell good, necessarily, but it would be fun to experience.
In The Queen’s Gambit, chess was a refuge for Beth Harmon, the process through which she transformed herself. It may be a conceptual refuge for perfumers too, a new semantic circle to play in. By centering chess, perfumers and perfume appreciators can, per Zweig, “sharpen the senses and stretch the mind,” vanquishing the boredom of revisiting well-worn olfactory concepts. To thrive as an art form, perfume has to look in directions other than the past; to concepts and ideas that uncover possibilities: cerebral, delightful, unexpected – without this move it may grow stale, blundering into a fool’s mate.🌀
Zhenya Tsenzharyk is a writer and editor living in London, covering (most) things sensory through a culturally critical lens. She loves to over-intellectualise her ever-growing perfume collection.