Salt & Straw Is Releasing a Line of Culinary Perfume That You Can Spray on Both You and Your Ice Cream

There’s so much we love about ice cream. From its deliciously creamy texture to its rich and indulgent taste, this cool and refreshing treat is just what we need on a hot day. But perhaps in our craving for this frozen dessert, never have we stopped to think that while it tastes and looks pretty great, it doesn’t usually smell like much of anything.

Salt & Straw is attempting to change that, however, with a new edible perfume that promises to make ice cream smell as good as it looks and tastes. While that’s a pretty bold promise, it is rather intriguing. Can the addition of an enticing smell make ice cream even better than it already is? The brand seems to think so.

If you were wondering, the reason that ice cream doesn’t have much of a scent is because the creation process involves freezing it at such low temperatures that the smells are lost to us. The flavors we love are not actually released until they are in our mouth and the warmth of our tongue begins the melting process. And that’s where the new edible perfume kicks in.

Salt & Straw’s Culinary Perfume, which was created in partnership with Portland perfumery Imaginary Authors, will add the scents to the ice cream that we imagine are there, but won’t actually change the flavor. The best part? It’s not only edible, but wearable, too. So if you really like that scent, feel free to take it with you all day long!

The new Culinary Perfume comes in three scents: A Cloud of Cocoa is a rich and smoky scent of malty cocoa; A Plume of Blooms has scents of honeysuckle and jasmine; and A Swoon of Citrus is a tart citrus with notes of key lime pie, lychee, and Italian lemon grove. Just spritz your preferred perfume (I’m most intrigued by the chocolate-inspired one) on your ice cream cup, bowl, cone, or on the scoops of ice cream itself. Then, prepare for your ice cream to be a sensory experience. Well … in theory, at least.

But perhaps there’s a whole world of possibility even beyond those spritzes. Ice cream is extra fun in sundaes, when we mix scoops of various flavors, so layering scents could be a fun choice in this sense too.

These scents will be sold online and in shop, with a 65-milliliter bottle going for $65, and a 3-pack (one of each flavor) smaller 10-milliliter bottles (sample/travel size) at $48. If you just want a spritz as a topping in a shop, though, that’s just 50 cents!

You can join the waitlist today on the brand’s site. The culinary perfume will be available online and at scoop shops on National Ice Cream Day, July 17.