Inside 12_things: The Fragrance Brand Bottling Liminal Spaces, Voids, and Urban Decay

If the scent of death could be bottled, would you wear it? Does an empty room have an odor if there is no one around to smell it? Can you transform the grit of tarmac into something beautiful, or identify the precise olfactory signature of a void?

These are the unsettling, provocative questions at the heart of 12_things, a new fragrance brand that deliberately rejects the polished, aspirational gloss of traditional perfumery to find a corrupted beauty in the dark, the dingy, and the dead.

Perfume has long existed in a realm of pristine aspiration and commercial order. For generations, mass-market and luxury scents alike have relied on a predictable playbook, evoking glamorous parties, decadent desserts, or sun-drenched yachts floating in the Mediterranean. Their notes are typically arranged in the neat, reassuring pyramid structure of classical perfumery, designed to offer an immediate escape from the drudgery of everyday life.

For founder Charles Vickery, however, perfume should do the exact opposite. Rather than serving as an escape hatch from reality, Vickery views scent as a medium to embrace the beauty buried within the dark spaces, neglected corners, and grimy cracks of the modern world.

Two foundational refrains appear throughout the branding and ethos of 12_things: “the world does not smell like a garden” and “every act of creation is at first an act of destruction.” The brand balances a dark realism with the inexorable laws of entropy, crafting perfumes inspired by urban infrastructure, city concrete, and abandoned buildings. These are scents designed not to remain static on the body, but to shift, evolve, and deconstruct upon the skin.

Consider Void, the brand’s idiosyncratic riff on the ever-popular "skin scent" genre. "It has quite a legible top note with Iso E Super and Ambroxan, so it smells like those ‘you-but-better’ perfumes," Vickery explains. "Then you get notes of paper, moss, and Suederal, so you get this impression of a person who has just come in from the rainy street… I love that journey of a corrupted skin scent where you can trick people into it with the top notes."

Similarly, Condensation plays with the concept of corruption. It takes the familiar, comforting "fresh laundry" scent profile so ubiquitous in household products and introduces the subtle, unsettling residue of human life left behind in a cramped, humid laundry room. Despite being a study in sensory conflict, it remains one of the brand’s most magnetic creations, drawing curious customers in the store before they even realize what they are reacting to.

A Commentary on Consumption and the Modern Wasteland

Beyond exploring unusual olfactory combinations, the fragrances of 12_things function as a direct, unvarnished commentary on consumer culture and the wider perfume industry. Vickery acknowledges an element of camp in his approach—a knowing wink to established perfumes already flooding the market, followed by a deliberate effort to completely upend them.

While mainstream brands champion idealized, inhuman freshness, 12_things leans heavily into what Vickery defines as true human scents. Where a fragrance like Infrastructure utilizes cold metal and rain-on-asphalt accords to ground wearers in the brutalist reality of urban landscapes, traditional perfumery is always urging consumers to look elsewhere.

"Traditional perfumery is always telling us to escape the world we live in; it wants to take us on holiday, and it excludes the beauty of the world we walk over," Vickery says. "The world around us, especially in somewhere like London, is concrete, metal, glass; it’s grey and a bit miserable, but I wanted to turn that ugly brutality into something beautiful, because it’s human, we see it every day."

This philosophy extends to all of the brand’s formulations, which consistently feature distinct human facets. Notes of salt, skin musks, and nicotine smoke evoke the transient human presence lingering at the margins of a construction site, the stillness of a body on a morgue slab, or the microscopic trace of skin cells left behind in a locked room.

Yet, few scents are as unsettlingly human, or as starkly alien, as those associated with mortality. Among the brand’s most polarizing offerings is Cold Storage, an olfactory portrait of a morgue that pairs cold metal and plastic accords with ambergris, iodine, and lichen.

"It sounds fucking horrendous, but you’ve got this heart of ambergris which gives a human presence because it’s got this saltiness and this zesty lime under the surface," Vickery admits. It is an unapologetically unpalatable creation, yet it perfectly embodies his overarching artistic project: throwing together luxurious, high-end ingredients alongside the detritus of the modern wasteland. They may not be comfortable companions, but that friction is precisely what generates interest and artistic beauty.

Tapping into the Appetite for the Uncanny

The launch of 12_things arrives at a moment when consumers are increasingly drawn to the weird and the unconventional in fragrance. The niche perfume market has experienced massive growth over the past few years, with atypical accords like industrial ink, hot vinyl, and asphalt steadily finding their way into commercial releases from major houses like Yves Saint Laurent and Tom Ford.

Psychologically, the appeal of unpleasant or challenging scents is well-documented. Many people harbor a secret affinity for the sharp tang of disinfectants, the fumes of a petrol station forecourt, or the dusty dampness of a basement, even if they would not traditionally classify them as beautiful. This exact grey area is where 12_things stakes its claim.

"Our minds are trained to view beauty as art or architecture, and yet most of the things we see every day are designed, and they have beauty within them," Vickery reflects. "Mixing these new scent accords of plastic and paper against these really fine perfumery ingredients was a way to have the scents exist in this grey space where you aren’t quite sure what to make of it."

A Store Designed to Disappear

This pervasive sense of uncertainty and friction is deliberately built into every physical and digital touchpoint of 12_things. Walking into their brick-and-mortar space yields no immediate answers; the store contains no explanatory signage, marketing brochures, or brand history, and the official website is similarly stripped bare.

Instead, the interior of the shop is fitted from floor to ceiling with repurposed bank vault drawers. These heavy metal compartments house the fragrances like miniature morgue drawers, serving as both display units and functional packaging. When a customer makes a purchase, the entire metal drawer goes home with them. In a radical subversion of modern retail mechanics, the walls of the shop literally function as the perfume’s packaging, slowly destroying the store with every single sale.

When all the drawers are eventually depleted, the physical location will permanently close, degrading over time in the exact same manner as the abandoned, liminal spaces that inspired the scents in the first place.

Vickery intentionally engineered this physical and psychological friction into the consumer journey to push back against modern digital convenience.

"We are living in this wasteland where brands are optimising everything for legibility and ease," he says. "You can imagine how something smells before you try it; everything is optimised to be purchased and shipped online with small bottles, perfectly rounded edges, all the same logo, same colour palette. I wanted to fuck with that and make something that was so heavy and inconvenient. You have to really want to understand what is going on here."

That barrier to entry is structural. For online shoppers accustomed to instant gratification, the prospect of acquiring a scent requires active engagement rather than passive clicking.

"If you’re browsing perfumes online, are you going to think ‘ooh I want to smell like metal!’… probably not, but if you talk to someone about the scents and try them you might be more interested. I wanted you to have to talk to someone at every point to buy the scents," Vickery notes.

To reinforce this barrier, the brand’s website functions as little more than a minimalist landing page hosting a direct mobile number. Vickery wanted prospective buyers to question the entire premise—wondering if a Shoreditch perfume brand where you have to text the dealer is a joke or an art project. At a time when automated systems and artificial intelligence are rapidly permeating every creative industry, he wanted the brand to feel inherently human through its sheer eccentricity and inconvenience. You have to genuinely want to experience the perfume enough to text a stranger and ask for access.

While perfume is traditionally utilized to sell dreams, idealizations, and aspirational identities, the aspirational quality of 12_things lies entirely in its uncompromising weirdness. By embracing friction and proving that genuinely strange pieces of olfactory art can still find an audience willing to inconvenience themselves, the brand offers a stark counter-narrative to mass production.

Beneath the dark aesthetics and confrontations with decay lies an unexpected current of optimism. For Vickery, a true measure of success will not be commercial ubiquity, but a shift in perspective.

"A real point of success for me will be if people start to think ‘you know what? It’s not that bad in the UK, it’s not that grim outside’," he says.

In a contemporary landscape dominated by algorithmic optimization, derivative dupes, and synthetic content, 12_things proves that there is still a vital appetite for physical reality, tactile inconvenience, and art that looks directly into the void.