Pharrell Williams Wants You to Smell Like Photosynthesis

What does Pharrell Williams smell like? Something like sunshine in a bottle — or so he would have you believe.

Light is the concept behind LV Lovers, Mr. Williams’s new fragrance for Louis Vuitton, which hired him as its men’s wear creative director last year. “The idea,” Mr. Williams said in an email, “is photosynthesis.”

While that gauzy notion may puzzle even the most passionate fragrance fans, it ought to resonate with Mr. Williams’s more ardent followers, who are likely to welcome the new scent as an olfactory distillation of his exceedingly sunny hit single “Happy.”

Since joining Louis Vuitton, Mr. Williams has incorporated natural light into his men’s wear shows. He presented his debut men’s collection for the label on Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge at dusk last June and, on Tuesday, models wearing his latest collection walked under an incandescent sky in a show held outside the offices of UNESCO, the United Nations’s cultural agency, in Paris.

With LV Lovers, Mr. Williams aimed to concoct a formula that conjured feelings of positivity and well-being — or the metaphorical sensation, as he put it, “that the sun is shining on us.” That feeling, Mr. Williams explained, is imparted primarily by galbanum, a woody-smelling gum-resin derived from a plant commonly found in Iran. It is the chief ingredient in the fragrance, which he developed in collaboration with the perfumers Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud and Camille Cavallier-Belletrud, a father-daughter team.