Dear friends!

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting the fourth annual Art and Olfaction Awards on May 6, 2017 at Silent Green Kulturquartier in Berlin, Germany.

We decided to take the awards on the road for its fourth edition as part of our commitment to create a global arbiter of excellence in independent, artisan and experimental perfumery. To put it simply: In order to call ourselves an international award, we need to occasionally pay a visit to the various communities we serve.

Berlin, like Los Angeles, is a hotbed of unconventional creativity. Intuitively, the awards seem at home there, and we felt like the people we met understood the space that our community inhabits (somewhere between unfettered creativity and the constraints of the global perfume industry). Mainly, we are very excited to make it easier for our participants, judges, partners and friends in Europe to attend the event: Berlin is central, Berlin is affordable, Berlin is fun to visit, and Berlin hosts an already thriving community of perfumers and artists  - some of whom we already know well.

 

 

Angelenos, have no fear fear: Our heart is still in Los Angeles. We will continue to run the awards out of our home base in downtown L.A. as one of the most crucial programs of The Institute for Art and Olfaction, for as long as L.A. will have us. We are also planning a special Los Angeles event around the awards for those who cannot make it to Berlin. Indeed, we hope that by taking the awards on the road, we will enhance the visibility of our community, on a more global scale.

 

On that note, the online submission form opens on October 5, 2016, 9am PST.

Note that we have made some small but crucial changes to the submission rules this year: You can download the updated rules here, but below are some highlights.

- We have tightened up our rules around reformulations. To be clear: We do not allow reformulations of perfumes that hit market under the same name in the same form (e.g. liquid perfume) before 2016.
- We now allow up to three submissions per fragrance company (up from two)
- We no longer require submitters to send their work in separate vials (one 15ml bottle will do!)
- As always, we accept perfumes that first hit (or are scheduled to hit) the market between January 1 and December 31, 2016. We will ask that every submitter have on hand documentation that proves the launch date, should it be called for.
- As always, we accept submissions in three categories: Artisan, independent, experimental.

You can review the full rules for each category at our submissions page. We open the online submission form on Weds October 5th, at 9am PST.

We are still working on our judging panel, but hope to have it finalized in the coming weeks. You can see the names as they are added here.

 

So: We have the date, we have the location, we have our updated rules, and we have a really tight judging panel. Join us by submitting on October 5th, or join us in person in Berlin, on May 6.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Best,
Saskia + the #AOA team