Pherny

Say Pherny aloud and it sounds like 'ferny'. Perfumers will enjoy that more than most people, because fougère, the French word for fern, names one of the oldest families in men's fragrance. The spelling, though, points somewhere else entirely. That 'ph' is borrowed from pheromone, the chemistry of attraction, the signal one body sends another without asking permission.

So the name reaches back into perfume history and forward into the biology of scent at once, and does it in six letters.

The concept images split the range by mood. For men, four matte bottles in navy, black and bottle green stand on a slab of slate, gold collars at the neck, the gold wordmark and its double swash across the front, with a steel watch and a pair of aviators nearby. For women, square glass flacons in citron, aqua, amber and coral rest on marble plinths among white roses, pearls and candlelight. Same name, two very different evenings.

A short name does well on a small object. Pherny fits a perfume bottle without crowding, embosses neatly on a bar of soap or a shaving balm, and leaves room on the box for whatever the buyer wants to say about the scent. It also carries the faintly forbidden glamour that fragrance has always traded on, without asking a customer to say anything they would blush to repeat at a department-store counter.