UPDATED: As the situation has drastically worsened, we have canceled the May iteration of Scent Week and the Art and Olfaction Awards. We will present both, in September 2020.

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Dear friends in the perfume community,

We are sincerely committed to our community. For this reason, all of us at the Institute for Art and Olfaction are - like everyone else we know - anxiously watching the Coronavirus / COVID-19 situation unfold.

While we cannot predict the future, or add any new information to the chorus of anxiety, we can pledge to act responsibly.

As of this writing, we have not planned to cancel the Art and Olfaction Awards. Nor have we planned to cancel any of the programs we are organizing for Scent Week.

Given the unfolding situation in Milan, our friends at Esxence have had to postpone their event to February 2021. As such, we have had to rethink how we will share the news about the finalists. We are working on this, and we will let everyone know our finalist announcement date and venue, soon.

With respect to the Awards and Scent Week activities in May, we are working with a number of partners to keep an eye on the situation, and honoring our partner venues' policies. We will, ultimately, comply with any recommendations put forth by LA County Department of Public Health. This might mean that we will need to go virtual for some of the events, and possibly cancel others.

We are keeping an eye - like everybody else.

As of right now, however, we're planning for the best case scenario, which is that this outbreak will be contained, and that we'll get to see everyone in person in May, in LA.

We look forward to getting through this unprecedented and truly surreal outbreak, together. As Douglas Adams puts it in Mostly Harmless: "We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own."

Let's never stop intersecting.

Best,
Saskia Wilson-Brown

Director
The Art and Olfaction Awards
The Institute for Art and Olfaction