This Is What the Apocalypse Smells Like

The apocalypse smells sweet. Sickly sweet to start, with a metallic tang and notes of smoke.

As part of a new show at London's Carroll/Fletcher gallery, artist duo Thomson & Craighead created a fragrance based on the apocalypse as it's envisioned in the Book of Revelation, working with perfumer Euan McCall to translate the burnt flesh, blood, and sea creatures of biblical end times into chemistry and producing a surprisingly not unpleasant scent.

It's a real, wearable perfume, but it's at least partly satirical—a comment on the commodification of end times. They've literally bottled the apocalypse as a luxury good.

To make the scent, the artists pulled out terms from the Book of Revelation for McCall to incorporate in the construction. "We were very strict in trying to define the list of terms as being tangible, real materials that would have an olfactory property—would have some sort of smell," Jon Thomson told me.

So it was that "flesh burned with fire" became represented by ingredients such as cumin and costus, and "blood" (of a dead man, of the saints, of the martyrs of Jesus) by a concoction including chemical aldehydes and metallic rose materials, to create a deep red scent that draws from 25 different apocalyptic descriptors.

"For me, it smells very much to begin with like high church and smoke, and then it's gone some really wonderful, metallic, ozone-y smells which are talking about the Earth being ripped open," said Alison Craighead. "Then through that we've got some flowers like wormwood going on, ideas of blood…"

Some of the components are more abstract than others. "There was a lot of sniffing around bins at things that were rotting and thinking about how they could be constructed, and talking about, 'What does burnt flesh smell like? What does putrefied flesh smell like?'" said Craighead.

The box of the high-end perfume also contains a second scent, focused more on decay, which took inspiration from smell of old Bibles the artists collected in their research and by their experience following a mouse infestation—"They can be a little bit sweet and truffley after a certain point," according to Craighead.

If it all sounds like a bit of an old-fashioned version of the apocalypse (it was inspired by a 15th century altarpiece by Master Bertram), it's not meant to be taken totally seriously, a point emphasised by the artists' insistence it be a genuinely wearable product. They've put the apocalypse up for sale, complete with fancy packaging.

"I suppose we're interested in the way in which we are all a little bit blind to our current condition," said Thomson, offering climate change as an example. "Also within entertainment, the commodification of end times becomes a meme in some respects, or a trope, or a series of symbols that we consume as entertainment rather than perhaps seeing them as other things."

Other pieces in the show, palindromically titled "Party Booby Trap," present versions of more modern doomsdays we could be trudging towards while distracted by these Hollywood visions.

One consists of a screen with strips of numbers steadily counting down. Each column represents one site of concrete-entombed radioactive waste; the numbers count the seconds remaining until it becomes safe for humans (a long time).

A future version of the Apocalypse perfume would perhaps smell rather different—the odour of superbugs, rising seas, and whatever plutonium smells like.