An obscure perfume worn by the actress Elizabeth Taylor was lost to time. Some passionate fans have given it a new life.
The scene had some of the enchantment of a spell-casting ritual: in a shoebox-size gallery with hot pink walls in lower Manhattan, a hushed crowd had assembled around
One that, you could say, promised to conjure Elizabeth Taylor.
The potion was a re-creation of an obscure perfume once worn by Taylor. It was concocted by Marissa Zappas, 38, an accomplished perfumer and the woman who unboxed the fragrance last Thursday evening at an opening event for Her Scent of Mystery, a new exhibition at the Olfactory Art Keller gallery in Chinatown.
The show, on through September 20, takes its name from Scent of Mystery, a 1960 film briefly featuring Taylor, who makes an uncredited cameo in its final shot.
Mercilessly panned – including in The New York Times – the movie famously incorporated a then-futuristic technology called Smell-O-Vision, which involved a clanking metal box with a bronchiole-like network of pipes being installed in a theatre. As Scent of Mystery played, the machinery would hiss odours in accordance with its scenes. When the villain smoked a pipe, for instance, gusts of tobacco-scented air hit the audience.
Another aroma associated with the movie, and the centrepiece of the new exhibition, is the sharp, spicy fragrance made for Sally Kennedy, the character played by Taylor. Developed by perfumer Raoul Pantaleoni, promotional bottles were given to press and guests at the Scent of Mystery premiere in Chicago. There were talks of Schiaparelli mass producing and selling it.
But the film flopped, and the Schiaparelli partnership never materialised. In recent years, only one bottle of the promotional “Scent of Mystery” perfume was known to exist. It belonged to Susan Todd, whose father, Mike Todd jnr, was a producer of the film.
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Advertise with NZME.Enter Zappas.
She was tapped to re-create the perfume after Todd gave her bottle, with her support, to the creators of the Her Scent of Mystery exhibition: Jas Brooks, 31, a professor whose work includes studying the relationship between human sensory abilities and scientific engineering, and Tammy Burnstock, 64, a producer and film-maker whose credits include In Glorious Smell-O-Vision!, a documentary about the technology. The two met at a screening of the documentary, released in 2019, and bonded over what they described as their incredibly niche obsession with olfactory cinema.
“The reality is, people mostly say, ‘Smell-O-Vision? What a joke!’” Burnstock said. “And we’re just like, no that’s our mission. It isn’t a joke.”
Zappas gravitated to the project partly because of her own obsession with Taylor. She has written about how, as a 7-year-old who struggled to communicate, she learned how to speak by watching the actor in National Velvet. As a child, Zappas would write fan mail to Taylor – her “spiritual maternal figure,” as she put it in an interview – and she now has tattoos of Taylor’s eyes on her forearms.
“I think I was really inspired by her rapturousness,” Zappas said of her olfactory muse. “She’s always been so good at owning her desires and going forth with them.”
To remake the “Scent of Mystery” perfume, which had a formula incorporating 60 raw materials, Zappas conducted a form of chemical analysis known as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which is also used to detect drugs and diseases. Her version is a near replica of the original, but has both fewer ingredients and some careful additions, like bergamot (to enhance the perfume’s citrusy opening) and a deft touch of powdery talc.
Small vials of the remake are being sold for US$54 ($93) by the Her Scent of Mystery exhibition organisers. They are also selling – for US$1400 – a larger, one-of-a-kind glass flacon that contains not only Zappas’ perfume but also a small amount of the original that inspired it.
Those interested in a whiff of either can freely indulge at the exhibition. Next to iPads displaying information about “Scent of Mystery” are hockey-puck-like instruments with powder-puff underbellies that are doused with carefully rationed drops of the original perfume. Laid beside them at the opening event were dishes of fluffy marshmallows.
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Advertise with NZME.“Wait,” said a woman after taking a bite of one. “This tastes just like the perfume!”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Iva Dixit
Photographs by: Hiroko Masuike
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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