The sweet smell of the Apple MacBook now available as a perfume

It was probably only a matter of time. A group of Australian artists have bottled what they claim to be the scent of the MacBook Pro for an upcoming exhibition.

The arts collective Greatest Hits, with help from perfume experts Air Aroma, created the perfume for an exhibition in their hometown in Melbourne. They were apparently inspired by the smell that exudes from a ‘newly purchased Apple product [being removed] from its packaging’.

The visual image of someone sniffing a new laptop might be a bit odd until you remember that part of the fun of buying new (and used!) records, books and even cars is the olfactory aspect. People who’ve read Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume will know that one method for creating perfume is to crush thousands of flowers into alcohol and then distilling the concoction to form a base.

But rather than putting a MacBook in the blender, Air Aroma sent for scent samples of cardboard, glue and plastic (the components of the packaging), and then had a new MacBook Pro delivered to their office, where it was unwrapped and analysed by their experts.

The Eau de MacBook will be on show in the Westspace gallery in Melbourne until 12th May. There don’t seem to be any plans to make the perfume available to retailers, which is probably just as well – we can’t imagine an occasion where smelling like a piece of aluminium is advisable.

As for the artistic value of this project, we’re far from experts on contemporary art so are loathe to comment.

However, we would say that every generation gets the art it deserves, and this generation definitely has done enough to earn this particular gem.