Zoologist: Perfumers Explore Animals and Their Habitats through Scent

“At the time, I was deeply dissatisfied with my career. I felt very anxious and frustrated. Perhaps it was what people call a midlife crisis. Everything was based on gut feeling.”

— Victor Wong, founder of Zoologist Perfumes

Basic Information

Founded: 2013, with the first releases in 2014
Founder: Victor Wong
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
Official website: zoologistperfumes.com

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

Music Heard at Primary School in Hong Kong

Unexpectedly, the seeds of Victor Wong’s passion for perfume were planted in a music lesson. At his primary school in Hong Kong, he heard The Carnival of the Animals by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Depicting fourteen animals in sound, including lions, elephants, cuckoos, and swans, the suite impressed on the young Wong a sense of animals as a source of creative expression.

Wong later moved to Toronto, Canada, where he became a 3D modeler in video-game development. Beneath it all, however, there remained a deep affinity with animals and a longing for creative expression.

A Hotel Stay That Changed Everything

The immediate catalyst for the brand was an experience in a hotel. Wong tried the Le Labo Rose 31 hand lotion provided in his room and was astonished by its scent.

“It was completely different from the scent I expected from hotel toiletries. Rather than the usual clean, fresh smell, it was rich, floral, and complex. I even wondered whether it was too feminine to wear outside. Little did I know that this was the entrance to the rabbit hole of niche perfumery.”

— Victor Wong

The experience rapidly drew him into the world of niche fragrance. Then, in 2013, feeling profoundly stuck in his job at a gaming company, Wong made a decision.

A Single Basenotes.net Post Changed the Story

Driven by dissatisfaction with work and a desire to create, Wong decided to start a project of his own. He had no industry connections, entrepreneurial experience, business strategy, or market research.

His first step was a single post on the fragrance enthusiasts’ online forum Basenotes.net. He asked whether any perfumers would help him develop scents for a brand he wanted to launch. Two independent perfumers replied, and the Zoologist story began.

“I had no industry connections, experience as an entrepreneur, business strategy, or market research. Everything was based on gut feeling. I posted on the Basenotes.net forum asking whether any perfumers could help me make perfumes, and two independent perfumers responded. The rest is history.”

— Victor Wong

An Unexpected Advantage from the Games Industry

His career as a 3D modeler proved unexpectedly useful in running a perfume brand. Working in a game studio had given him a direct understanding of product development: what might sell, what might not, and whether to take risks and break conventions. It also taught him practical product branding through packaging, marketing copy, and social media. Former colleagues helped illustrate his bottle labels, bringing old friendships into the brand’s beginnings.

From Hobby to Full-Time Work

For the first few years, Wong kept his job in the games industry, spending evenings after work packing orders and developing the next fragrance. In 2014, the year the brand was born, its first three releases were Beaver, a leathery fragrance by Chris Bartlett; Rhinoceros by Paul Kiler; and Panda, also by Paul Kiler.

Only five bottles sold in the first year. Today, the brand sells around twenty thousand bottles annually and supplies fifty-four shops in at least twenty-five countries. As the company grew, Wong eventually left his job to devote himself to Zoologist.

The Brand’s Commitments

Choosing Only Storytellers

Central to Zoologist’s approach is Wong’s decision not to employ a dedicated in-house perfumer. Instead, he collaborates with different independent perfumers and accomplished classically trained perfumers from around the world, carefully matching each individual’s personality to the animal they will interpret.

“I look for perfumers who are storytellers: people who can create visual images through scent, and who are willing to add something unusual to a formula, even at the expense of wearability.”

— Victor Wong

For example, a perfumer known for highly unconventional fragrances might be assigned a less familiar animal or a challenging concept. Someone who makes beautiful, classical fragrances might be given an animal associated with elegance. This skillful casting brings consistency and diversity to the collection at the same time.

The story of Thai perfumer Prin Lomros, who one day tracked down Wong’s address and mailed him around fifteen prototypes, vividly illustrates perfumers’ enthusiasm for the brand.

An Ethical Approach to Making Fragrance

Zoologist replaces natural animal-derived musks with synthetic materials. It avoids ingredients obtained from the glands of musk deer, civets, and beavers as part of its policy against harming animals.

“Our products are free from natural animal-derived musks; they have been replaced with synthetic ones for ethical reasons. We don’t want to harm animals so that we can smell good.”

— Zoologist Perfumes

This does not mean that the entire collection is free of animal-derived ingredients. Bee and Hyrax use animal by-products such as beeswax and African stone. The brand describes these as materials collected in nature without harming animals. Its guiding principle is to avoid animal cruelty, rather than to make every fragrance vegan.

A Fragrance Philosophy with Two Approaches

Wong describes two approaches to developing fragrances. One emphasizes animalic notes associated with the animal itself, such as castoreum in Beaver. The other takes inspiration from its habitat or surroundings, such as the cave air in Bat. Sometimes, as with the original Macaque by Sarah McCartney, he translates into scent the meditative mood an animal evokes in people. This multifaceted approach gives the collection considerable depth.

Bottle and Packaging Design

Zoologist’s bottles feature distinctive illustrations by staff artist Daisy Chan. Animals dressed in tailcoats or Victorian royal attire appear on substantial glass bottles, finished with leather-covered caps and gold rims. The fragrance descriptions read like passages from nature documentaries or imagined stories sent from the animals’ habitats.

The brand’s dislike of excessive packaging is another characteristic. Wong himself has described the proliferation of faux-leather boxes nested inside more faux-leather boxes as the thing he dislikes most about the perfume industry.

Bat’s Cave and the Creation of a New Version

Ellen Covey, who created the original Bat in 2015, is also a scientist who studies bats’ hearing and behavior. Drawing on her experience of searching for caves in Jamaican forests, she sought to evoke cool, damp limestone, the fruit the animals eat, and the musk of clean fur. The perfume portrayed the smells surrounding a bat’s life as well as the animal itself.

She used geosmin, a material with earthy and watery associations, for the smell of the cave. She left out floral notes because she imagined a small, cave-dwelling, fruit-eating species rather than a nectar-feeding bat. Choosing what did not belong in that animal’s world was part of shaping the fragrance.

It was Covey’s original that won an Art and Olfaction Award in 2016. The business relationship with the perfumer ended in 2019, and a new Bat by Prin Lomros followed in 2020. His composition moves from guava and passion fruit into the depths of a cave suggested by damp earth and roots.

Hummingbird’s Nectar and Mossy Nest

Shelley Waddington was drawn to the playfulness and humor of making perfumes inspired by animals. For Hummingbird, she imagined a lively little bird moving from flower to flower to taste their nectar before returning to a mossy nest.

Honeysuckle and mimosa, with the sweetness of pear and honey, express the nectar. Waddington likened musk and sandalwood to a soft blanket surrounding the bird in its nest. She took particular care in selecting the pear, honeysuckle, and mimosa materials, and secured a sandalwood with good diffusion. These choices brought flowers, food, and shelter into one story.

A light, creamy impression connects the sweetness of flowers and fruit. Hummingbird was also among Fragrantica’s selections for the best indie and niche perfumes of the previous decade in April 2020.

Giving Squid’s Marine Scent the Texture of Ink

Céline Barel imagined Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and a giant squid emerging from the ocean’s depths. Shortly before receiving the brief, she had encountered what she described as a squid bone on a beach in Dubai and become interested in its salty, sweet smell. Headspace analysis, which examines the aromatic compounds surrounding an object, helped her investigate that smell as a starting point for the composition.

Wong asked her to strengthen the dark, inky impression and the spices. Recalling her experience of making squid-ink pasta sauce, Barel wanted a smooth, dense texture as well as saltiness. She developed the ink accord with resins and balsams, also using an IFF tool that explores relationships between colors and fragrance materials.

Barel describes the result, with its salty air, frankincense, and dark ink impression, as a fresh, sensual marine amber. In 2020, Squid won the Fragrance Foundation’s Perfume Extraordinaire of the Year award.

A Prehistoric World in Tyrannosaurus Rex

Tyrannosaurus Rex began with a joke. Wong smelled a vetiver fragrance by Antonio Gardoni and compared its primitive, dangerous character to a dinosaur. The following morning, Gardoni said that he could not get the subject out of his mind. The two spent hours discussing the idea over a meal.

Wong imagined an illustration in a science book, filled with erupting volcanoes, forest fires, and enormous animals and plants. Gardoni thought of this scene as vertical movement through scent. Patchouli forms a thick layer of ground, with flowers built from ylang-ylang and champaca floating above it. Relationships between materials suggest drops falling and smoke rising.

Neither man could directly establish how the age of dinosaurs smelled. Gardoni therefore entered an imagined world of immense flowers dripping with nectar and forests on fire. The flowers were central to portraying an unknown environment, rather than merely softening the fragrance’s intensity.

Warm Grain Fields and Cold Antarctic Air

In Harvest Mouse, Luca Maffei portrays the surroundings of a tiny mouse living among grain fields. It gathers seeds and fruit at dusk and returns to its nest when it hears an owl. An autumn countryside and a warm place to shelter form the setting for this small animal’s day.

Beer and hay extracts create the impression of the fields, while chamomile and orange blossom express the warmth of the sun. Wong has compared the result to rum-and-raisin ice cream. The fragrance takes in the land where the animal finds food, the sunlight, and the comfort of returning to its nest.

Penguin turns instead to Antarctica, where emperor penguins protect their eggs. While the mother goes to sea to feed, the father huddles with the other males and guards the egg against the wind. To suggest this harsh setting, perfumer Chiaki Nomura used IFF’s Arctical for its cold, airy character and Oceanol for its marine and seaweed associations.

Wong describes the note called Antarctic Air as imaginary: it is not air collected at the location. Materials suggesting cold and the sea meet the soft textures of musk and suede, evoking the polar atmosphere and the presence of an animal living there.

Nightingale’s Waka and the Poem Accompanying Rabbit

Nightingale began as a fragrance Tomoo Inaba made for himself in 2013. He refined one of more than fifty private formulas for release through Zoologist. Its inspiration included a waka poem expressing feelings for someone entering religious life, and a story about a plum branch and agarwood prayer beads sent as gifts.

Inaba used plum blossom to express spring and a new life, and oud for the fragrant wood in the story. Patchouli and moss added a classical character. The bird’s name came from the association between springtime plum blossoms and birdsong. Rather than beginning with an animal’s habitat, the fragrance brought a personal composition and literary inspiration into Zoologist’s animal world.

Rabbit, a perfume by Fanny Bal, was accompanied by a sonnet by poet Jehanne Dubrow. A perfume enthusiast herself, Dubrow proposed a collaboration involving poems inspired by Zoologist fragrances. Wong then commissioned a poem for the packaging and promotion of a forthcoming release.

Dubrow had known The Velveteen Rabbit and Watership Down since childhood. Her Rabbit poem follows rabbits feeding in a meadow at night and pausing at a bird’s call. Alongside a composition that includes impressions of vegetable leaves, carrot, hay, and biscuit, words convey the world of these small animals.

Floral Camouflage and the Sting of Tentacles

Inaba’s Orchid Mantis takes its subject from a mantis that resembles a flower as it waits for prey. Pear, rose, and jasmine meet basil and ylang-ylang to create an orchid-like floral richness. Patchouli, moss, and woods place it in a humid rainforest, suggesting the moment when what appeared to be a beautiful flower reveals itself as a predator.

In Portuguese Man O’ War, Antoine Lie translates the creature’s danger into a sharp sting of ginger and metallic gunpowder impressions, followed by saltiness that includes seaweed absolute. Beauty and predation, the presence of the sea and the shock of contact: the creatures’ appearance and behavior become part of the fragrances’ construction.

By the Way…

Sergey Borisov, co-founder of the prominent perfume-review website Fragrantica, once offered this assessment: “When I look at Victor Wong, I think he is to independent perfumers what Frédéric Malle is to master perfumers.” It aptly captures Zoologist’s role as a place for experimentation by accomplished perfumers from around the world.
There is also the story of The New York Times featuring Zoologist in an article about animalic fragrances, whose author subsequently won an award for the piece.
Wong says his earliest scent memory is his father’s hair gel. Asked about his own perfume style, he replied that almost all his fragrances contain musk.