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Cowboy Bebop fragrance line created to celebrate anime’s 25th anniversary

Casey Baseel Oct 31, 2023
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Smell like Spike, Faye, or Julia thanks to Tokyo’s anime perfume specialists.

There’s a lot to love about Cowboy Bebop, and anyone who’s seen the 1998 anime classic will tell you that its visual and musical style is in the top tier. Now, as part of its 25th anniversary celebration, Cowboy Bebop is set to stimulate another of your senses, with a new line of eau de parfum and aroma diffusers.

As you may have guessed, these fragrances come from Fairy Tail, the Tokyo-based anime-inspired fragrance company (which, incidentally, is a sperate entity from the identically unorthodoxically spelled Fairy Tail anime/manga franchise). This isn’t Fairy Tail’s first time creating a cologne for Bebop’s moody main character Spike Spiegel, but he gets a new eau de parfum for the series’ 25th birthday, with elements chosen to reflect his personality and history.

The designers wanted to emphasize Spike’s individualistic instincts and physical strength, expressed as top notes of orange and bergamot citrus that gives way to vanilla accord, lemon, and spicy, woody tonka beans. And just like Spike has some heavy things lurking in his past, his fragrance’s base notes consist of cedar, sandalwood, and amber.

Also getting her own fragrance is Faye Valentine. Faye’s scent is crafted to leave a fresh and spicy sensation, with the designers wanting her “hedonistic” personality alluded to by raspberry, blackcurrant, bergamot, and cedar top notes. For most of the series, it’s hard to say whether Faye’s brash attitude shows she feels no commitment to her bounty hunting shipmates or whether she’s come to see them as a surrogate family, the middle notes switch things up with a fruity floral mix of rose, pear, iris, freesia, and cyclamen, and in a final acknowledgement of the bond she forms with Spike and the others while trying to unravel the secrets of her forgotten past, the base notes here are sandalwood, dry amber, and white musk.

And rounding out the trio of character fragrances is one for Julia, Spike’s old flame who’s so mysterious we never learn her last name. Famously described by Faye as being the sort of person where you can’t quite tell if she’s a devilish angel or an angelic devil, Julia’s perfume is complex and brimming with classical feminine elegance, with top notes of peony, lychee, and freesia, then middle notes of rose and rosewood before a base of magnolia, lily of the valley, dry amber, and sandalwood.

Cowboy Bebop’s recurring theme of one’s past versus one’s future also shows up in a pair of aroma diffusers. The “Past” version, with its artwork taken from the anime’s ending credits, is a throwback to the days when Spike and Julia’s romance was in full bloom, represented by a sweet rose scent to evoke memories of Spike waiting for Julia at their meeting spot so they could run away together, when he was still blissfully unaware that things weren’t going to be that simple.

The ”Future” diffuser instead focuses on Spike’s days of adventure after starting his new life and chasing down bounties with the help of partners Jet, Faye, and Ed, with an invigorating mix of pepper, oakmoss, coffee, and musk.

The character fragrances are priced at 4,400 yen (US$29) each, and the diffusers 3,850. They’re being offered for advance sale at the Cowboy Bebop 25th anniversary exhibition currently being held at the Seibu Shibuya Movida Building in Tokyo, and will be available through Fairy Tail’s online store Dreaming Princess, plus online retailers such as Amazon and Rakuten, starting November 20, as well as at Fairy Tail’s physical store inside the Nakano Broadway shopping center.

Related: Dreaming Princess
Source, images: PR Times
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