Smells Like Luxury presents a bright, neon perfume bottle rendered with the visual seduction of high-end branding, yet its contents replace aspiration with decay. Suspended inside the vessel are a skeleton, worms, and exposed brains, an anatomical inventory that turns the promise of refinement into a memento mori. The bottle becomes a sealed display case, suggesting that luxury is often less a substance than a spectacle: a glowing container designed to make mortality feel distant, controllable, and purchasable.

The neon intensity evokes retail lighting and digital advertising, where desire is engineered through saturation and shine. Against that polished surface, the interior reads as abject and undeniably physical. Worms signal consumption from within, the slow work of time that no fragrance can mask. The brains introduce cognition and complicity, implying that the fantasy of luxury is not accidental but learned, internalized, and maintained through cultural scripts that equate beauty with value.

By literalizing what the bottle cannot admit, Smells Like Luxury asks what is being covered, deodorized, or aestheticized in the pursuit of status. It frames luxury as a kind of embalming practice: an attempt to preserve identity through objects, even as the body insists on its limits. The work offers a critique of commodified desire, where the scent of prestige is sold as transcendence, and the evidence of impermanence is kept hidden behind glass.