A year ago, we featured Italian supermarket Italmark's new home fragrance: a reed diffuser with the scent of alpine flowers at risk of going extinct, created to highlight biodiversity loss in northern Italy. Now, Brazilian beauty behemoth O Boticário has launched a similar concept: a perfume called Extinto.
As the brand points out, when a natural environment suffers degradation, its specific fragrance is one of the first things to disappear. The inaugural scent in O Boticário's Extinto line aims to replicate what Brazil's iconic Guanabara Bay smelled like before it was covered in trash and its waters grew murky — 18 thousand liters of raw sewage are discharged into the bay every second. O Boticário describes the perfume as expressing "the freshness of the waters and the lush green of the forests, with a dewy effect."
Unlike Italmark's home fragrance, Extinto isn't available for purchase, although customers can experience the scent at select O Boticário stores. Following Guanabara Bay, Extinto will capture the pre-pollution fragrance of endangered natural areas on other continents: Madagascar, Calabria, New Delhi and Arnhem Land.
