Fairy Tail takes inspiration from anime’s biggest series and stars and turns them into unique fragrances for fans.
From its name, you can probably guess that Tokyo fragrance company Fairy Tail draws inspiration from stories that have captured people’s hearts and sparked their imaginations. However, the muses for Fairy Tail’s line of scents aren’t the casts of Disney films or Brothers Grimm books, but some of Japan’s most popular anime, manga, and tokusatsu characters.
Fairy Tail has an online store, called Dreaming Princess, but they also have a physical store inside the Nakano Broadway shopping center in Tokyo. We recently stopped by the shop for a talk with Fairy Tail’s company president Yuki Kumagai to hear about how the company first started making anime character fragrances and learn a little more about some of its newest creations.
SoraNews24: What was the first character-inspired perfume you produced?
Kumagai: It was actually a perfume for Mashin Warrior Wataru [also known as Keith Courage in Alpha Zones outside Japan], back in 2018.
SN24: Whoa, Wataru? That’s a series from like 30 years ago. We would have expected you started with a newer franchise.
Kumagai: We were blessed with good timing on a number of factors. First off, since it was the first anime-themed perfume we were making, I kind of wanted it to be for my very favorite series [which is Wataru], so we contacted the rights holder, Sunrise, and they said “We just so happen to be looking into what sort of merchandise we can develop to celebrate Wataru’s 30th anniversary. It was a total coincidence that we’d decided to reach out to them then, but they thought the idea of making a perfume was interesting, and so the negotiations progressed really smoothly from there.
▼ The Wataru perfume is a mix of verbena, Fougeres, musk, and amber aromas.
Kumagai: Even if a series has a large fanbase, it’s hard to predict how many hardcore fans there are that will buy special merchandise. In the case of the Wataru prefume, there turned out to be more hardcore fans than we’d expected, and the perfume sold better than we’d expected. We were especially surprised to see how many customers we had who said they hadn’t bought perfume of any kind before.
▼ Fairy Tail has since expanded its lineup to cover dozens of anime, video game, and tokusatsu series, including Puella Magi Madoka Magica, KonoSuba, Attack on Titan, Rascal Does Not Dream, Evangelion, Slayers, Cardcaptor Sakura, Rent-A-Girlfriend, Beastars, and King of Fighters.
SN24: What other perfumes sold better than you had expected?
Kumagai: The perfume for C.C., from Code Gears, was a really big seller. So were the series-inspired ones for City Hunter and Kinnikuman.
Then there was the perfume for [Madoka Ayukawa from] Kimagure Orange Road. That series doesn’t even have an official website or social media account, but the perfume was still a big hit.
▼ SoraNews24 covered the Orange Road perfume when it was first announced.
Looking through Fairy Tail’s list of current and past products, there are a lot of series from the ‘80s and ‘90s, as Kumagai isn’t one to let a series’ age preclude it from becoming one his olfactory muses. “Even if a series is over and done with, if it’s a good story, it’ll stick with you,” he explains.
▼ The Cowboy Bebop Spike Spiegel scent has elements of ginger, moss, and sandalwood.
▼ Dragon Slave, named after the destructive black magic incantation of Slayers’ Lina Inverse, contains scents of passionfruit, jasmine, and cedar.
Kumagai also spoke with us in more detail about Fairy Tail’s newest creations, two perfumes inspired by Japan’s No More Eiga Dorobo (No More Movie Thieves) anti-piracy public service announcements.
Kumagai: While talking with Toei about a perfume based on on of their tokusatsu series, their representative handed me a [No More Eiga Dorobo] pamphlet and said “These two characters have a lot of female fans, so what do you think?” It was just a quick comment during our conversation, but it’s turned into our newest perfumes.
The concept of a thief and a police officer being linked is something that there have been fans of since Lupin and Zenigata in Lupin III. And with the No More Eiga Dorobo characters, just about everyone has seen them [from the PSAs they play at theaters before the start of movies], so they’re characters a lot of people are familiar with.
SN24: How did you come up with the specific scents for the two characters?
Kumagai: Looking through the pamphlet they gave me, I learned that they actually have pretty detailed profiles. Camera Man [the movie pirate] is stylish and skilled at parkour. Movie piracy is a serious crime with penalties up to 10 years in prison and fines of 10 million yen, but Camera Man still has a flashy and stylish image, so we gave his perfume the scent of roses and chypre.
Patrol Lamp Man, as the movie theater’s security guard, is diligent and dedicated. At first I thought about using tobacco notes, because I have a smoky image of theaters, but then I thought that wouldn’t be appropriate for a charcter kids are so familiar with, so I went with a masculine, woody scent, the sort of thing that fits with a strong sense of justice.
Camera Man and Patrol Lamp Man themselves will be appearing at a launch event on July 2 at 3:10 p.m. at the fountain plaza inside the Sunshine City shopping center in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood. Both of their fragrances will be on sale there but can also be ordered through Fairy Tail’s online store Dreaming Princess, along with the rest of their currently in stock perfumes, body mists, hand gels, and diffusers.
Top image: SoraNews24
Insert images: SoraNews24, press release, Fairy Tail (1, 2)
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