Duran Duran’s signature New Romantic look and sparkling, sometimes broody sound have propelled them to unimaginable heights and made them arbiters of taste. Now Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, and Roger Taylor, who have pleased the eyes and ears for over 40 years, are coming for your third sense, smell. Working with Sergio Momo of Xerjoff, the band has introduced two new fragrances (with names that reference song titles)—NeoRio and Black Moonlight.
NeoRio is bright, exploding with top notes of candied fig, rum, and elemi absolute, before gently mellowing with saffron and soft rose oil; Tonka bean and Peruvian balsam bind it all together. Darker and more sensual, Black Moonlight has a base of patchouli, vetiver, Tonka bean, and benzoin, which is overlayered with top notes of bergamot and mandarin, as well as saffron, lavender, Sambac jasmine, and hazelnut.
Over Zoom, Rhodes, who led the project with LeBon (though all members were involved) said the two fragrances are representative of the band’s “yin and yang” duality. An A-side/B-side analogy might work as well. “We’re always looking at different ways to express what Duran Duran is,” said Rhodes, who, in the course of our conversation, revealed what he smelled like in the 1980s and the nuts and bolts of perfume making as he experienced it.
Fragrance is something that really interests me, in part because we can’t digitally recreate touch and scent, which I think gives these two senses more value than they’ve had in a while.
Makes perfect sense.
I’m wondering how this project got started and how scent fits into the Duran Duran universe?
Well, interestingly, following on from what you’re saying, we’ve spent most of our career for several decades trying to excite people’s senses, in particular sound and vision. [We’ve done this] with live shows, obviously with songs we write, with videos, we’ve made films, but we’ve never really had the opportunity to use the other senses so much, so the idea of making a Duran Duran scent that would affect people, hopefully in a very positive way, was exciting to us. We approached the project in the same way that we approach everything we do, with a sort of blank sheet of paper and said, “Right, what would we like to create here?” We were guided very carefully by Sergio Momo, who owns the Xerjoff brand, and he really educated us about what scent is, how it works, how it’s made from the base notes up to the high notes, and how you can very, very subtly tweak it, when you add one more ingredient, you can just change the whole mood of what you’re doing—there are so many possibilities.
