International Flavours and Fragrances Competition

IFF is a global leader in flavours, fragrances, food ingredients, health and biosciences. They deliver groundbreaking, sustainable innovations that power everyday essentials from brands you know and love, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Scent holds a vital place in culture, connecting us to memory, identity, and the future. It’s also an emergent material in contemporary art. Each year, IFF invites students to explore this through a future-facing fragrance brief, inspired by ideas of the body – the physical, ecological, and dream body. Through scent immersion workshops, guest lectures, and hands-on making, students explore scent as a counterbalance to our disembodied digital world. Finalists collaborate with IFF perfumers to develop their concepts into real fragrances, presented to a panel of partners including Nina Ricci and Le Figaro, with winners chosen before Christmas.

Each year, students respond to a brief set by IFF, one of the world’s leading fragrance houses. It’s a two-part process: first, finalists are selected; then they work with expert perfumers at VP in Versailles to develop and realise their ideas. IFF sees this as a vital way to tap into the thinking of the next generation. Finalists also gain access to IFF’s global archive of brand, packaging, and marketing materials, with mentoring and tutorials throughout. The competition explores how scent – often overlooked in design – can be used as a powerful, material part of creative practice.

Winners have the opportunity to develop their fragrance ideas with world-class perfumers, gaining unique industry insight and mentoring. For IFF, the partnership offers access to fresh thinking from the next generation – essential in a saturated market where scent’s true power lies in memory and impact. Past projects have been radical and speculative, like Anna Talvi’s scent-infused space glove for astronauts. Students also collaborate across disciplines, including the Fashion MA, using scent and design to challenge conventions and explore new possibilities.

• Axel Strynar (IFF Winner 2025); His project called Raw is a perfume designed to evoke the adrenaline rush triggered by smelling ammonium salts. Its bold marketing campaign, inspired by cigarette packaging, uses provocative imagery and blunt warnings that paradoxically create a sense of dare. The prototype bottle, built from a Zippo lighter, adds an interactive, ritualistic element to the experience. Unlike traditional fragrances that merely suggest emotion, Raw delivers a genuine physical and psychological rush. It’s a perfume for thrill seekers – a physiological top note paired with a daring state of mind, designed for those chasing excitement on a night out.
• Jack Kaplan (IFF 2025 Winner); His project called Solarkoss is a holistic wellness fragrance designed around the concept of bottling the sun. The scent aims to capture the warmth, energy, and revitalising qualities of sunlight, offering a sensory experience that promotes wellbeing. Currently in development for the market, Solarkoss has recently secured a trademark for the brand name.
• Ru Gajadeera (IFF 2024 Winner); S.O.S – Save Our Seas is a project that evolved from the IFF Prize, using scent as a powerful tool to explore the emotional and environmental impact of ocean pollution. Combining olfactory design and science, the project contrasts a familiar, clean ocean fragrance with unsettling industrial notes, evoking the chemical and acoustic contamination of our seas. With IFF’s support, two “dirty ocean” scents were developed, highlighting the tension between beauty and destruction.
• Yunyi Zhang (IFF 2025 Winner); Sensorium is a collaborative project with Liszu Tan and Yuko Hasegawa that brings together fashion, sculpture, communication, dance, and scent to create a true “total work of art.” Inspired by the German concept of uniting multiple art forms, the project layers live performance with scent, sound, and visuals. Specially curated knit textiles embed pipettes containing fragrance and colour, contouring to the dancers’ bodies as they move. The scent is activated through touch, while vessels of disappearing ink trace the moment of contact. The result is a fleeting, multisensory experience where the body, scent, and movement merge into a living sculpture.