HVAMMSVÍK
Olfactory identity of place, 2022–
Created for Hvammsvík Hot Springs
IT BEGAN WITH A SHAMPOO
In early 2022, Fríða Jónsdóttir and Gríma Thorarensen came to visit me.
Gríma and Skúli were preparing to open a new bathing place in Hvammsvík later that year, and they wanted me to create a scent for the shampoo and soap that would be used there.
At the time, I had already been developing my own sulfate-free shampoo with a formulation company in Sweden. I wanted it to be 100% biodegradable.
The solid shampoo was ready.
The liquid one wasn’t.
They tried what I had been working on and liked it so much that I decided to speed up the development.
What had begun as a request to create a scent became something larger.
I ended up developing and producing the products for the baths as well.
RETURNING TO HVAMMSVÍK
I already had many scents in my archive that belonged to this kind of landscape.
Seaweed. Moss. Grasses. Heather. Trees. The shore.
So when Fríða and Gríma first came to me, I could already let them smell many of the materials that connected to Hvammsvík.
But I kept returning to the place itself.
I walked, smelled and gathered, noticing what was there and how the landscape changed with weather and time.
And Hvammsvík wasn’t entirely new to me.
I had memories there.
I had spent a lot of time around Hvammsvík as a child, often out on the water with my family.
So while I was trying to understand what made Hvammsvík smell like itself, I was also returning to a landscape I already knew.
The place existed both in front of me and somewhere in my memory.
BETWEEN LAND AND SEA
The baths sit right at the edge of the ocean, and we wanted the scent to have a strong connection to the sea.
So for me, seaweed and marine vegetation had to form the base.
That also became one of the biggest challenges.
Seaweed has a way of taking over.
I wanted the ocean to be present, but I didn’t want the scent to become simply aquatic. It needed something lighter, something that could lift it.
But I had given myself a rule.
I didn’t want to use anything that couldn’t be found in Hvammsvík.
For a while, I couldn’t find the top of the scent.
Then one day I arrived at Hvammsvík and they were cladding part of the buildings in Icelandic larch.
I had two different larch scents in my archive, so I tried adding just a small amount.
And suddenly the scent clicked into place.
Later, we discovered that larch had actually been planted nearby by the Icelandic Forestry Association.
It had been there all along.
HVAMMSVÍK AT HOME
The scent later became part of a collection of products for the body and home, allowing something of Hvammsvík to travel beyond the place itself.