Marissa Zappas Brings a New Scent to the Sex Museum

A whiff of strawberry sweetness hits you as soon as you enter "The Pink Bedroom," an exhibit at New York's Museum of Sex. The installation is a jumble of shocking pink objects (stuffed animals, cosmetic bags, music boxes, shoes and sex toys) arranged around a bed made of pink sheets and pillows. But it also features a mish-mash of scents: rose, baby powder, and…is that cat pee?

Artist Portia Munson has exhibited different versions of "The Pink Bedroom," a diorama that explores childhood and femininity, since 1994. Her exhibition at the Museum of Sex, which runs through July, is the first time the installation has had a signature scent.

It was created by Marissa Zappas, 36, a perfumer in Brooklyn. Ms. Zappas, who has a namesake line, has earned a reputation for creating fragrances with atypical collaborators like sex workers, poets and astrologers, most of whom are women.

“The Pink Bedroom” perfume – small bottles of which cost $45 – kind of took years to make: Ms Zappas first approached Ms Munson, 62, to work on a project together in 2018. Ms. Zappas loosely modeled the scent after the scent of Cupcake Dolls, a type of scented toy popular in the 1990s.

A theme of The Pink Bedroom exhibit is the loss of innocence, and Ms. Zappas wanted the fragrance to reflect that. To balance the sweetness evoked by its floral and fruity notes, Ms. Zappas added black currant bud, which has a pungent smell that she says is often mistaken for that of cat pee.

"There's those classic pink 'girly' smells, but there's also something that's unsettling, uncomfortable," Ms. Zappas said recently as she stood inside the installation "The Pink Bedroom", in which its fragrance is pumped through a diffuser.

Mrs. Munson said Mrs. Zappas understood that "'The Pink Room' is meant to be very alluring and beautiful, but also a little too much and a little gross."

Jane Dashley, who reviews fragrances for Fragraphilia, a fragrance website she helped found, said Ms. Zappas specializes in "uniquely feminine scents, like fairy tale, ballerina, bows and feminine ribbons". But, Ms. Dashley said, there is a darkness beneath the surface.

Latex and leather

In 2019, Ms. Zappas created a fragrance inspired by "Porn Carnival: Paradise Edition," a book of love poems by Rachel Rabbit White. After reading the book, Mrs. Zappas contacted Mrs. White and the two developed Paradise Edition, a fragrance with notes of jasmine, orange blossom and citrus. salt water.

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