This Las Vegas scent company has bottled the smell of Halloween
This Las Vegas scent company has bottled the smell of the season: a rotting corpse.
Aroma Retail, known for bottling scents for Strip resorts and casinos, has now bottled the scent of a rotting corpse just in time for Halloween. Offered as an essential oil for diffusers, room spray and candles, the scent is intended to create an unsettling aroma for trick-or-treaters this spooky season.
CEO Jim Reding said he created the scent last year for a Halloween scene featuring it’s own rotting corpse in a major amusement park. He is selling it commercially now so customers can spook their guests. Since going live, he said he has sold around 2,000 units.
“So regrettably, I have a lot of experience with this. I was in the military for quite some time, Desert Storm,” said Reding. “The amusement park that I developed it for, they didn’t want putrid, so we just went further down the timeline” of the decomposition process.
On the nose, the scent is earthy and herbal, similar to the scent of fresh cut grass.
“It’s very advanced rotting corpse, so it’s earthy, because we eventually return to dust,” said Reding. “We didn’t actually get a cadaver from UNLV.”
The top notes of the scent are wet grass, pine coffin and sour lemon; mid notes of damp soil, mossy stone, dehydrated basil and decaying flowers; and base notes of fermented fruits, damp undergrowth, cold body musk and overgrown moss.
Aroma Retail has a relationship with a fragrance house in New Jersey that creates the fragrance concentrates, but the final product is made in its Las Vegas fragrance factory at 5525 S. Valley View Blvd. The scent is also available for purchase on the company’s website and at the factory.
“I work on the blending or I’ll find something that I like or curate it,” said Reding. “They’ll create the concentrate and then we have the concentrate in the factory.”
Reding is no stranger to creating atmospheric aromas, being the man behind the signature scents pumped into Strip resorts and casino, many of which are still used today.
He got his start in the fragrance industry when he was assistant general manager during the opening of The Venetian casino-hotel in 1999. During his tenure, he oversaw the retail end of the property and managed the scenting vendor, where he said, “I just fell in love with it.”
From there, he got into fragrance development and crafted the scents for the Wynn, Mandalay Bay, Aria, MGM Grand and more.
In 2017, he went on to found Aroma Retail with his wife, Cristina Reding, where they now sell the signature casino scents to the general public.
“I personally created them, so that’s why I can sell them, but I can’t always use everybody’s name,” said Reding.
Contact Emerson Drewes at edrewes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @EmersonDrewes on X.
