Do you know that smell/scent can be trademarked? There aren’t many scent trademarks recognised by the US Patent and Trademark Office (also yet to find out in Malaysia), one cannot just trademark any “concocted” scent. You need to establish that a fragrance serves no important practical function other than to identify and distinguish a brand, so it doesn’t apply to perfume scent, though in some cases the composition of perfume may be patentable.

In Play Doh’s case, its trademarked scent is described as a unique scent formed through the combination of “a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, and the natural smell of a salted, wheat-based dough” and REGISTERED in the US!