IFF (International Flavours and Fragrances) Prize

IFF is a global leader in flavours, fragrances, food ingredients, health and biosciences. They deliver groundbreaking, sustainable innovations that power everyday essentials from brands you know and love, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Scent holds a vital place in culture, connecting us to memory, identity, and the future. It’s also an emergent material in contemporary art. Each year, IFF invites students to explore this through a future-facing fragrance brief, inspired by ideas of the body – the physical, ecological, and dream body. Through scent immersion workshops, guest lectures, and hands-on making, students explore scent as a counterbalance to our disembodied digital world. Finalists are chosen before Christmas and collaborate with apprentice-perfumers at IFF to realise the smell element of their concepts. They then present their projects to a panel of IFF judges, chief among them Judith Gross, IFF’s Global VP of Communication and Branding, Scent. Winners are chosen a few months later in March.

Each year, students respond to a brief set by the RCA's Zowie Broach and Susan Irvine and submitted to IFF, one of the world's leading fragrance manufacturers. It’s a two-part process: first, finalists are selected; then they work with apprentice-perfumers at IFF to develop and realise the scent element of their ideas. IFF sees this as a vital way to tap into the thinking of the next generation. The competition explores how scent – often overlooked in design – can be used as a powerful, material part of creative practice.

Winners find innovative new ways to use smell as material, gaining unique industry insight and intensive mentoring from RCA tutors. For IFF, the partnership offers access to fresh thinking from the next generation - essential in a saturated market. Scent's power lies in its ability to deeply affect our emotions and vivify memory. Past projects have been radical and speculative, such as Anna Talvi's breath-activated Earth-scent gloves for cosmonauts voyaging to Mars.

• Axel Strynar (IFF prize winner, 2025); RAW is a perfume for thrill seekers – a physiological top note paired with a daring state of mind, designed for those chasing excitement on a night out. While most scents have a purely psychological effect, RAW delivers a genuine physical rush, thanks to a topnote infused with the ammonium salts athletes use to give them a jolt of adrenaline. Its bold marketing campaign, inspired by cigarette packaging, uses provocative imagery and blunt warnings that paradoxically create a sense of dare. The prototype bottle, built from a Zippo lighter, adds an interactive, ritualistic element to the experience.
• Jack Kaplan (IFF runner-up, 2025); His project solarkoss is a wellness fragrance designed around the concept of bottling the sun. The scent, created to his brief by apprentice-perfumer, Omar Chandorkar, uniquely incorporates fragrance raw materials which have a measurable effect on mood. Some of these ingredients even promote neurogenesis in the brain, making them highly effective mood-enhancers. The bottle - made by Jack's collaborators, RCA students Alexandre P Manko and Ben Politt - is designed like a sun that lights up as you approach it, providing a dose of radiance on the darkest winter day. Currently in development for the market, solarkoss has recently secured a trademark for the brand name.
• Ru Gajadeera (IFF 2024 Winner); S.O.S – Save Our Seas is a project that evolved from the IFF Prize, using scent as a powerful tool to explore the emotional and environmental impact of ocean pollution. The project began with a collaboration between scent and science using olfactory design as a medium to express the emotional and environmental impact of ocean pollution. With IFF’s support, she created a pair of “dirty ocean” fragrances that contrast a familiar clean ocean scent with unsettling industrial notes to reflect chemical and acoustic contamination. These were first exhibited at the RCA, and since then, the project has grown into a multisensory installation and participatory workshop featured at the UN Ocean Decade Conference in Nice. At the conference, she presented S.O.S as part of a larger dialogue on ocean literacy and youth engagement. The scent installation allowed participants to experience the fragility of marine ecosystems through scent and visual storytelling.
• Yunyi Zhang, Liszu Tan and Yuko Arai. (IFF 2025 Overall Winners); Scensorium is a collaborative project that brings together fashion, sculpture, communication, dance, and scent to create a true “total work of art.” Inspired by the German concept of uniting multiple art forms, the project layers live performance with scent, sound, and visuals. Specially curated knit textiles embed pipettes containing fragrance and colour, contouring to the dancers’ bodies as they move. The scent is activated through touch, while vessels of disappearing ink trace the moment of contact. The result is a fleeting, multisensory experience where the body, scent, and movement merge into a living sculpture.