Childhood fame, it’s
official – Play-Doh is the smell of a
generation.
Now that the kids who spent their childhood mushing pink
putty in their hands have become old enough to run the world, they’re changing
the rules of intellectual property to protect their olfactory legacy.
Actually, says here Play-Doh has been around since 1956.
But I am curious as to how many 60-year-olds today reminisce about the smell of
Play-Doh? Feel free to comment on this. I asked a gentleman of about 50 but he’s
from Germany. They had their own Play-Doh he says, and he didn’t recall its
smell in the same way.
In the US, Play-Doh was a cultural phenomenon; is that
what you would call it? For anyone who did not experience something I will call
a standard American childhood, the colored putty probably just smells like
putty.
To a trained fragrance designer who also did not experience
the standard American childhood, it probably smells like “sweet, slightly
musky, vanilla fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, combined with the
smell of a salted, wheat-based dough.” Because that’s what the trademark now
says.
To that generation of US kids who played with it, it smells
like childhood and fun.
So this is now a trademark, which I should assume is
something like being protected under intellectual property or copyright law.
This is a big deal then, because we can’t copyright fragrance. Fragrance and
Fashion are two art forms that cannot be protected under the same laws that
sent Pharrell
into
the courtroom over Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines.
In fact, after a quick perusal, it looks like there’s
only
ten
other scents in this category (and the UK only has two). The ironic
loophole
here for Play-Doh is that a product that serves only the purpose of its scent
cannot be protected. Play-Doh is a toy, not a perfume or a candle or a
cardboard cutout of an evergreen tree. (In the UK, it’s for rose-scented car
tires.)
Verizon stores have their own scent trademarked. One that
I really like is this company that makes engine lubricant, and it’s got three
different aromas that make your car exhaust smell like a fruit basket (cherry,
grape and strawberry to be specific). "Fuel Fragrances" by Manhattan
Oil, check it out. I like this one because it leads me to my quick diversion –
scented Crayola crayons. What the heck were they thinking? They should’ve taken
a page out of Play-Doh’s book. The Doh smells good, but it’s not an edible
scent. Sure, they say “cherry overtones” and vanilla, but everything smells
like cherry and vanilla, right? It’s just not the same as labeling a brown
crayon “Chocolate” and then making it smell like chocolate.
In conclusion, and despite the excitement of this news, I
am compelled to express my regret on this one issue: Using words to talk about
smells is a joke. I understand that laws are made of words, and so that’s all
we have, but this – doesn’t mean much in the world of smells.
I would much rather see it as “the smell of childhood and
fun.” But I guess that’s too vague. (“Sweet, slightly musky, vanilla fragrance,
with slight overtones of cherry, combined with the smell of a salted, wheat-based
dough.”)
Hasbro trademarks
Play-doh’s scent: Sweet, slightly musky
AP News, May. 18,
2018
Notes
The subject of intellectual property comes up a bit here,
so I added some links for your interest:
Post Script
Play-Doh and used Play-Doh do not smell the same. Because
it’s sticky, and kids can be gross, and together, that makes Play-Doh,
potentially the grossest smelliest thing ever. Kids pat it down on peanut butter
and paint-covered surfaces, then on the ground, then on their foreheads… Then
they take that entire surface area and squish it upon itself, putting all those
microbes that were on the outside, now on the inside, and making more, new
outside that can now stick to new microbes, which will be squished back into
itself again, and again. It might be the greatest recipe for a germ-bomb ever.
Then again, according to this seemingly disruptive news about
Leukemia and germs, that
might not be a bad thing. Maybe Hasbro has another patent brewing as we speak.
