SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 22, 2026 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — ScentFest SF, the West Coast’s first international consumer fragrance festival, opens June 26 to 28, 2026 at the Gateway Pavilion at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Founded by Sebastian Jara, creator of The Perfume Guy on YouTube, the inaugural three-day festival gathers more than 110 fragrance houses from around the world, the traveling archive of the Osmothèque, and a program of talks featuring some of the most recognized names in perfumery, all built for the public rather than the trade.
Image caption: ScentFest SF, the West Coast’s first international consumer fragrance festival, June 26-28, 2026 at the Gateway Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. (Image courtesy ScentFest SF)
The centerpiece is the Osmothèque, the world’s largest fragrance archive, based at Versailles, France. For the first time, it will present its historic scents at a US consumer festival: 25 fragrances spanning nearly 4,000 years. The journey begins with Kyphi, the sacred scent of ancient Egypt, and runs through the cologne Napoleon wore, Houbigant’s Fougère Royale of 1884, widely called the birth of modern perfumery, and the original 1921 formula of Chanel No. 5 as Ernest Beaux first composed it. Among the rarest are Coty’s Chypre (1917), the perfume that named an entire fragrance family, and Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris (1947), a lost masterpiece collectors treat as a holy grail. Most are no longer made and survive almost nowhere else, making this a once-in-a-lifetime chance to smell them.
The festival’s Scent Sessions program, presented by the luxury house Amouage, brings three days of talks and panels featuring marquee names from across the industry. Amouage creative director Renaud Salmon headlines, joined in a Saturday rapid-fire session by Mona Kattan, founder of Kayali. Master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, a live smelling of original historic formulas led by the Osmothèque’s Thomas Fontaine, and dozens of perfumers, brand founders, and critics round out a program on the art, craft, and culture of perfumery.
On the festival floor, the more than 110 houses range from established names to independent perfumers found in no department store, and nearly all sell on-site, so a scent discovered is a scent to take home that day. At the Algorithmic Perfumery station from EveryHuman, visitors answer a few questions and an AI composes a personal fragrance, blended and bottled on the spot (a custom 5ml bottle is $25).
“For one weekend, the public gets to walk into a world that usually stays behind the closed doors of the trade,” said Sebastian Jara, founder of ScentFest SF. “You can smell 4,000 years of perfume history, meet the people behind the bottles, and leave with a scent made just for you.”
The timing is deliberate. ScentFest SF caps a remarkable week for fragrance in Northern California, following the World Perfumery Congress in Monterey (June 23 to 25) and the Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley (June 24 to 26). It is the one part of that week made for the public.
ScentFest SF is open to the public from noon to 6 p.m. each day; press, industry, and VIP pass holders enter at 10 a.m. General admission is $49 for a single day or $139 for a three-day pass. Tickets and the full schedule are at https://scentfestsf.com/.
ABOUT SCENTFEST SF
ScentFest SF is the West Coast’s first international consumer fragrance festival, June 26 to 28, 2026 at the Gateway Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. Founded by Sebastian Jara of The Perfume Guy, it features more than 110 fragrance brands, the Osmothèque, the Algorithmic Perfumery experience from EveryHuman, and the Scent Sessions program presented by Amouage. Tickets at https://scentfestsf.com/.
ABOUT THE OSMOTHÈQUE
Founded at Versailles, France in 1990 by master perfumer Jean Kerleo, the Osmothèque is the world’s largest fragrance archive, preserving more than 4,000 perfumes from antiquity to the present, including some 800 no longer produced, under strict temperature and atmospheric controls. Learn more: https://www.osmotheque.fr/en/.
MEDIA AND BRAND CONTACT INFO:
Media contact: Tom Schroeder, Media Coordinator, ScentFest SF, tom@scentfestsf.media, 408.315.1909
Brand contact: R. Randall Schroeder, Brand Manager, randall@theperfumeguy.net, 415.596.9000
Editor’s note: A video introduction to ScentFest SF, hosted by founder Sebastian Jara, is at https://youtu.be/LBvPAP6zZ90.
High-resolution images and interviews are available on request from Tom Schroeder (tom@scentfestsf.media).
Follow the festival on Instagram (@scentfestsf), Facebook (https://facebook.com/ScentFestSF), and YouTube (https://youtube.com/@ThePerfumeGuy).
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IMAGE link for media: https://www.Send2Press.com/300dpi/26-0622s2p-ScentFest-SF-300dpi.webp
Image caption: ScentFest SF, the West Coast’s first international consumer fragrance festival, June 26-28, 2026 at the Gateway Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. (Image courtesy ScentFest SF)
News Source: ScentFest SF
