There’s a strange scent in the air around the city — and it’s not just the smell of garbage in August.
Three scratch-and-sniff billboards for Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty have been installed in Manhattan. When passersby agitate specific areas on the advertisements, they get a whiff of the new Rare Eau de Parfum — the first fragrance from the phenomenally popular cosmetics brand.
“This makes me feel like I’m in elementary school,” said Melanie Peralta, a 34-year-old consultant who lives in Bushwick and smelled one of the billboards in Soho, on the corner of Grand and Lafayette, on Wednesday morning. “It reminds me of those smelly markers growing up.”
It took her five scratches to get a hit of the fragrance — she was scratching in the wrong spot at first — but she was satisfied in the end.
“It smells good, like light vanilla,” she said. “I’m more intrigued to want to smell the actual perfume now.”
To make the billboards — which are also located at Canal Street and Broadway, and the Highline and West 27th, and are as large as 25-by-7 feet — Rare Beauty first developed a scented ink.
Then the ink was wrapped in microbubbles that were printed onto different parts of the billboard. When scratched, they release the fragrance. The billboards, which were installed in late July and are up through August 10, are refreshed regularly to keep the smell strong.
“The activation was inspired by something many of us remember from growing up, those iconic magazine perfume peel-offs,” Ashley Murphy, Rare Beauty’s company’s Vice President of Consumer Marketing, told The Post. “We wanted to reimagine it in a way.”
One woman fretted about looking odd smelling a wall.
Fans of the scent, which will be released in stores on August 7, can scan a QR code on the billboard, which will link them to a Shopify app where they can order a free sample.
While it’s impossible to know how many people have sniffed the billboards, an announcement video about them got over six million views on Instagram, one of the company’s top performing posts for the year.
Some germ-weary New Yorkers refuse to participate.
“I don’t want to touch something all these other people have touched,” said Simon Sakhai, a 37-year-old who runs a longevity startup and was passing by a billboard Wednesday morning. “This is Manhattan! You don’t touch things and then smell them. You never know what you’re going to get.”
But, he added, “For $100, I’d do it.”
A 38-year-old who works in a pottery studio around the corner from the Soho billboard, was also apprehensive.
“Since the Covid times I have tried not to touch public things,” she told The Post.
But her curiosity — and her admiration for Selena Gomez, whose face is also on the billboard — persuaded her.
“Selena is perfect, she’s just adorable. I love her,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. “I decided I just wanted to try it.”
Aside from the germs, she did worry about what others would think of her smelling the ads.
She said, “I don’t want people to wonder what I am doing sniffing a wall.”
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