Fah Thai Magazine Mar-Apr 2020

CHALIDA KUNALAI
Sniffing
Success
Words Khetsirin Pholdhampalit
Photos Suwit Kittitien
A scent ‘architect’, Chalida Kunalai
has designed everything from hotel
ambience to colours for the blind
Chalida Kunalai has been sniffing
out opportunities all her working
life. The professional scent designer
has created pleasant fragrances for
consumer products – like rose-smelling
laundry detergent and green tea-scented
dishwashing liquid – as well as the bad
smells of a gas leak, burning and sour
milk to warn blind people about dangers.
“Our sense of smell is a human instinct and
is closely linked with memory and experience. A
whiff of cologne in a department store can remind
you of an ex-boyfriend who wore the same scent,”
grins Chalida, who has been in the scent business
for 30 years. “Fragrance can also add a layer to your
personal identity, like invisible clothing. That’s why
we use the phrase ‘wear perfume’. Smell is thus a
powerful and creative form of communication related
to emotion and experience.”
Chalida, who looks far younger than her 50 years,
got her first sniff of the scent business three decades
ago when she landed a job as an account executive for
a perfume house. The role taught her plenty about the
art of fragrance.
“A scent designer works closely with a perfumer.
I am the ‘architect’ who creates plans that are used
to make something, while a perfumer is the engineer
who takes those plans and makes them practical and
usable,” says Chalida, who graduated in political
science and mass communication.
After working in the perfume house for 10 years, she
moved on to designing fragrances for Asian consumer
products – a role she has filled for the past 20 years. Her
task is a challenging one: to create scents that can be
infused in goods that will appeal to different lifestyles
and cultures of countries across Asia.
“For instance, Chinese food normally doesn’t have
strong flavours, so Chinese people prefer light and natural
odours to strong-smelling scents. On the contrary, we
can’t use light, pleasant odours for goods sold in India
because Indians have noses that are familiar with intense
spices. Thai people, meanwhile, like floral and fruity scents
such as lavender and apple,” says Chalida, whose nose
was “educated” at courses on perfume she took in France
during which she learned more about sensory perception
and the raw materials of fragrances.
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