5 Trademarked Smells Stinking Up Rarified Air
In 1946, the Lanham Act declared that proprietary words, names and symbols could be protected by trademark if they were used in commerce. People soon started asking: What about smells? It took until 1990 for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to concede that the act didn’t explicitly exclude stinks, so they had to be eligible.
Since then, only about 15 smells have been granted a trademark. Here are a few of the stenches stinking up rarified air…
Proprietary Foot Stench
You ever get back home after a long day, peel off your shoes, take a nice, long sniff and think: I hope no one steals this. If not, then you don’t have what it takes to make it in the international shoe biz. There are two different shoe companies who have managed to call dibs on the unique stank that wafts from their products.
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One company, Sol Imports, owns the specific coconut scent they give their sandals, which is logical enough. Then there’s Brazilian shoe company Grendene, which owns the bubblegum scent that cascades off of their rubbery pink “jelly sandals.” If people want to walk around imagining their feet are caked in old gum, who am I to judge?
To accomplish this rare feat of legal dibs-calling, the bureaucrats in charge would have to smell it firsthand. They sent one of their shoes to the Commissioner for Trademarks with the note, “The applicant … respectfully submits the enclosed sandal as evidence.”
Play-Doh
When your slogan is “fun to play with, not to eat,” it’s a safe bet that every market research audience for half a century had kids chomping entire fistfuls. Squeezing a chunk of Play-Doh makes you yearn to experience the mouthfeel, and that one scene from Hook where they chow down on impossibly colorful nothingness is seared into the brains of an entire generation. And that smell. That delicious, hearty, proprietary smell!
If they really wanted kids not to eat it, they would have given it the carbon monoxide treatment, and make it smell like something the human body is naturally repulsed by. But everything about the “combination of a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, and the natural smell of a salted, wheat-based dough” makes me want to hurl my Chipotle across the room and bite into a log of that good Doh.
It’s been immortalized by the Demeter Fragrance Library, and Hasbro was able to trademark it in 2018.
Engine Oil
One major criterion for trademarking a scent is that it serves no functional purpose. It must A) not be “essential to the use or purpose of the article”; and B) not impact “the cost or quality of the article.” That’s probably why there are so few trademarked scents — it’s hard to go on the record that your stink is both extremely special and completely pointless. And it’s hard to see how Manhattan Engine Oil threaded that needle.
The company sells 20 different “fuel fragrances,” the whole point of which is to give a hint of flavor to your exhaust. It’s the La Croix of carbon footprints. Only three of those 20 scents have been trademarked: Charged Strawberry, Cherry Bomb and Groovy Grape, leaving us with more questions than answers: Do those three flavors just straight-up not work, satisfying the “no essential purpose” clause? Or are they the three worst sellers, ticking the “does not impact cost” box? Most important of all: Who are you trying to impress with grape-scented car farts?
Ukuleles
Based in Idaho, Eddy Finn Ukuleles acknowledges they’re not in traditional uke territory. But they hang their hat on their “different vibe,” and encourage their customers to “unleash that inner voice that says, ‘I want to be different.’” Anyone who picked up a ukulele in the halcyon days of 2010s Tumblr has absolutely looked themself in the mirror and said, “I want to be different.”
But how would Eddy Finn differentiate itself as a company? By making their ukes smell like last call at the Time Square Margaritaville. They won a trademark for a piña colada-scented ukulele, easily satisfying the pointless and worthless criteria. But once they went into production, they ran into a whole new problem — when shipping anywhere outside of the U.S., the piña colada scent wore off, leaving customers with tragically ukulele-scented ukuleles.
One Guy Is Allowed to Impregnate Your Mail
In 2010, a Bulgarian citizen won a U.S. trademark to make promotional flyers smell like roses: “This odor may be impregnated into promotional items … or the packaging or advertising associated with promotional items which may have no odor.” As proof of stink, he sent the Commissioner of Trademarks a mailer for a jewelry store that had a rose-scented hand wipe in it.
So if your mail ever smells like roses, just know that Kalin Manchev has been in there, like a stinky little Santa Claus.
