The Golden Pear: Inside the Art and Olfaction Awards

There is no Cannes for perfume, no Booker, no Turner Prize. For most of the industry's history the only meaningful recognition came from sales figures or from the trade's own promotional prizes. The Art and Olfaction Awards were built to fill that gap, and after twelve editions they have become the closest thing independent perfumery has to a serious benchmark.

The twelfth edition took place on 11 June 2026 at the Gazarte cultural centre in Athens, alongside the seventh Experimental Scent Summit two days earlier.

Saskia Wilson-Brown and the Institute

The awards are run by the Institute for Art and Olfaction, a non-profit founded by Saskia Wilson-Brown and based on Chung King Road in Los Angeles. Its stated purpose is unglamorous and unusually clear: to widen public access to scent. Alongside the awards it runs classes, open sessions, a materials database, a gallery programme and a public reading list.

Wilson-Brown started the awards at the suggestion of the perfumer Bruno Fazzolari. The first ceremony was held in April 2014 at the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles in front of roughly a hundred people. The ambition was corrective rather than celebratory — existing industry prizes were expensive to enter, opaque in their judging, and structurally inclined towards the houses that could afford to play.

What the IAO built instead is worth spelling out, because the mechanism is the point. Judging is blind and runs in several phases. The panel is international and deliberately mixed: perfumers, critics, artists, academics. Submission fees are kept low. Finalists are announced publicly, in a separate ceremony months before the winners — this year on 1 May in Los Angeles. Entries are assessed on artistic and technical merit alone.

The trophy is a golden pear, which is also the name of the awards' own site.

The categories, explained

Independent

For perfumes released by independent brands. In practice these are houses where an owner or creative director commissions an outside perfumer — the credit typically names both. The scale is larger than artisan, the structure more conventional, but the brand remains outside the corporate portfolios.

Artisan

For perfumers who compose and produce their own work, usually at small scale and without a separating layer between the person and the bottle. The winner credits here tend to carry a single name.

Newcomer

For first-time entrants to the field. It was introduced in 2024 and became the fourth juried category in 2025, replacing the Aftel Award for Handmade Perfume, which was discontinued that year.

Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent

The most interesting category, and the one furthest from a bottle on a shelf. It recognises scent used as an artistic medium — installations, performances, museum commissions, research projects. Past winners have included work built around recreating the smells of famous deaths and a piece using a purpose-built scent organ.

Contribution to Scent Culture Award

Discretionary rather than juried. It goes to a person or collective who has meaningfully expanded public awareness of independent, artisan and experimental scent work.

Septimus Piesse Visionary Award

Also discretionary, named for the nineteenth-century perfumer who tried to map scent onto musical scales. It honours unusual vision in how scent is used, developed or imagined.

People's Choice

Voted by the public rather than the jury, awarded separately in the Independent and Artisan categories.

The 2026 winners

Independent Category: Ici, le pas s'arrête by TERRA•T, composed by Kaiwei Hsieh for Terrence Chen, Taiwan — and Nuit Elastique by Première Peau, composed by Ugo Charron of MANE for Pierre Mergui, France.

Artisan Category: Aethi Opum by Maya Njie, United Kingdom — and Death by Vanity by Rivendare, David Clarke, Australia.

Sadakichi Award: Goavve-Geabbil, the Hyundai Commission, by Nadjib Achaibou of Givaudan for the artist Máret Ánne Sara, Norway.

Newcomer Award: Water Moon by Oneiros, composed by Anh Ngo of IFF for Thanh Dang, Vietnam.

Contribution to Scent Culture: Grant Osborne, for Basenotes, United Kingdom.

Septimus Piesse Visionary Award: L'Osmothèque, the Conservatoire International des Parfums, accepted by Anne-Cécile Pouant.

People's Choice, Independent: Verdant by Ilé Olomu, Andreas Wilhelm for Bawo Ijirigho, USA. People's Choice, Artisan: Dandelion Butter by Clue Perfumery, Laura Oberwetter and Caleb Vanden Boom, USA.

What the list shows

Read the 2026 winners next to the 2014 list and the shift is obvious. The first edition was won by houses in France, the USA and Germany. This year's juried winners come from Taiwan, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Norway and Vietnam. Since 2024 the ceremony itself has alternated between Los Angeles in odd years and a different city abroad in even ones — Lisbon, then Athens, and Mexico City in May 2027.

The Sadakichi award is doing something else again. A Hyundai-commissioned work by a Sámi artist, realised by a Givaudan perfumer, is not a perfume in any retail sense. That it sits on the same stage as a niche release is the clearest statement the IAO makes about what it thinks scent is for.

Submissions for the thirteenth edition open in late September 2026, for work brought to market during the calendar year.