Cartoon stick figure holding an orange Play-Doh container with scent lines, next to a list describing its sweet, musky, vanilla, cherry, and salted wheat dough aroma — representing the Play-Doh scent mark.

Trademark: PLAY-DOH® Scent

First Used: September 1955

First Registered: May 2018

Current Owner: Hasbro, Inc. [1]

Trademark type: non-traditional trademark; scent mark

Registered for: toy modeling compounds [2]

Description: a scent of a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, combined with the smell of a salted, wheat-based dough

Brief (and likely incomplete) History [3]:

The smell that instantly brings you back to childhood (or parenthood). Anyone who has played with, or cleaned up, PLAY-DOH® putty can still remember the smell of the putty in your hands, both before and long-after touching it.

PLAY-DOH® putty was first developed by Kutol Products in the early 1900’s as a wallpaper cleaner, primarily for cleaning and removing soot from the surface of wallpaper. Once one of the largest wallpaper cleaner manufacturers in the world, the company began to struggle in the mid-1900’s as society transitioned to cleaner formers of energy to heat and power households.

In the 1950’s, two employees from the company received a call that would change the fortunes of the cleaning putty forever. A nursery school teacher and family relative had recently read a newspaper article describing how the wallpaper cleaning putty could be used by children to make art modelling projects. She suggested they start marketing their product as a toy putty, and even thought of a name: Play-Doh.

Since the PLAY-DOH® brand’s inception in 1956, the secret recipe for the putty compound has remained largely unchanged: the same smell your parents and grandparents grew up with is the same smell you and your children can “enjoy” today.