Dorset man makes theme park smells for a living

Graveyard, bubblegum and mummified body are just some of the smells sitting in bottles on a bookshelf in the flat of Liam Findlay’s lounge.

In the comfort of his own home in Weymouth, Dorset, the 32-year-old gets paid to design different smells which get used at theme parks.

The smells help make roller coasters more thrilling and Halloween scare mazes more frightening.

“Theme park guests might not realise it, but smells hold incredible power over their memories and emotions,” he says.

The niche job is a good icebreaker at parties, Findlay explains “because it just invites lots of questions”.

He says: “A lot of the time they don’t even know what the job is and that it would exist. If you think about theme park smells, you think about popcorn and sweat and crowds and things.

“But a lot of people don’t know that there are actually people that make the smells or at least make smells.”

He fell into the job after becoming an attraction designer and one of his first jobs was managing an escape room in Weymouth.

“I went on to help design an escape room for the Bear Grylls adventure in Birmingham and I did lots of attraction design jobs from that,” he says.

Findlay continues: “I don’t have a perfumery background, but I have an understanding of what the attractions teams go through when they’re making new attractions.”