Perfume What do you get when the South of France Cloud meets Silicon Valley? A new generation of fragrances made using big data and artificial intelligence.

By SARAH DANIEL

FROM THE OUTSIDE, the world of fragrance creation can seem magical and mysterious. A marriage of poetry and chemistry, it captures the imagination, conjuring images of a French-born nose filling a weathered, leather-bound note- book with secret formulas or hand-picking ingredients from the idyllic fields of Grasse, the world’s perfume capital. Now picture that perfumer tapping a touchscreen and using data-driven algorithms to develop the next L’Eau d’Issey or Dior Poison. It’s artisanry meets artificial intelligence, and it’s the future of perfumery. For 28-year-old Maxime Garcia-Janin, whose start-up, Sillages Paris, creates custom scents using machine learning—a method of data analysis that falls under the umbrella of AI—this digital transform- ation was a long time coming. Working briefly in perfumery for LVMH and L’Oréal (the latter is one of his investors), he often heard colleagues pin the fragrance industry’s decline on millennials. The assumption was that because millennials are obsessed with all things visual, they wouldn’t be interested in buying perfume. “For me, it was the complete opposite,”

60 e l l e c a n a d a . c o m BEAUTY

says Garcia-Janin. “I think millennials company’s database and suggest new Which brings us to the second benefit love fragrance because we’re a genera- combinations and ingredient ratios. of using AI: speed. While perfumers tion that wants to be unique—we want Each perfumer’s style and approach are artists, when they work for large to emphasize what makes us different to perfumery comes with biases (if you’d companies that create scents for fashion from one another. And fragrance is the asked Matisse and Cézanne to each houses and beauty brands, they’re also perfect product for that.” Similar to how paint an apple, you’d have gotten two under a lot of pressure to translate stacks Spotify creates personalized playlists based very different apples, points out Viola), of marketing briefs into future bestselling on listening history, Sillages Paris helps whether that’s favouring ingredients (many formulas, which can feel like the opposite consumers build a bespoke fragrance by perfumers work with only a fraction of of art. If fragrances like Lancôme’s La asking a series of questions and providing the 3,000 or so available) or gravitating Vie Est Belle take four years to create, the guidance of a team of young perfumers toward certain fragrance categories, like AI can shorten the incubation period to dubbed “super-noses.” It’s such a departure gourmands or chypres. Philyra is doing months, says Viola. It’s no wonder other from the traditional perfume model that pure data analysis, explains Viola, so it companies are leaning into tech too. Garcia-Janin considers his brand luxury doesn’t have any biases, which means it Fragrance giant Firmenich launched fragrance 3.0. “I think we went from can eliminate those blind spots. D-Lab, a collaboration with École zero to 3.0 because before we came to A lack of creativity within the perfume polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, a the market, nothing existed in terms of world is what drove Edmonton-based Josh Swiss university specializing in science digital technology in high perfumery.” Smith to start his own brand, Libertine. “I and technology. And earlier this year, Indeed, the perfume industry is a late was interested in scent and found a lot of Givaudan (of which Bill Gates is the adopter. The category trails behind skin- releases and big-box-store fragrances sort largest shareholder) introduced Carto, care and makeup brands, which have been of boring,” says Smith, whose scents have an AI-powered program that features a quicker at using AI and augmented reality; been endorsed by notoriously-hard-to-im- colourful touchscreen reminiscent of the for example, Sephora’s Virtual Artist app press perfume critic Luca Turin. Smith one CNN shows off on election night. lets consumers try on thousands of lipstick puts out one perfume a year, which leaves Even with all these high-tech tools, shades, and Olay’s Skin Advisor offers plenty of time for him to experiment with the process doesn’t work without the personalized product recommendations his formulas and dream up new ideas. perfumer. Similar to how autonomous based solely on an uploaded selfie. While While he sees why the big fragrance com- cars—whose algorithms can be thrown some 20th-century innovations—such as panies are betting on AI to transform the off by pigeons, snowflakes and even gas chromatography mass spectrometry creative process, he doesn’t think we’ll see tree shadows—require a human to in the 1950s, which allowed perfumers a big change at the fragrance counter. “I make sense of anomalies, only a human to discern the molecular composition think with AI, it will just be a faster way perfumer can understand the difference of a scent, and headspace technology in of creating more of the same.” between a potential masterpiece and the 1980s, which enabled them to cap- a mediocre formula. “It’s logic, not ture the fragrance of a rare flower or an creative,” says Firmenich master obscure aroma and then recreate it in a perfumer Olivier Cresp of the technology. lab—have pushed the fragrance industry WITH AI, Cresp, the man behind blockbusters like forward, many consider AI to be the most Thierry Mugler Angel and Dolce & significant development in over a century. PERFUMERS Gabbana Light Blue, started his career “It’s probably the biggest disruption since as a perfumer in the mid-1970s and 1874,” says Claire Viola, vice-president of WILL HAVE received the Fragrance Foundation’s digital strategy fragrance at Symrise, a lifetime achievement award just last year. global fragrance company. That was the THEIR OWN He says using this new technology is a year Symrise’s founders created vanillin, “positive” change because it allows him one of the first synthetic ingredients to be PERSONAL to concentrate on important projects, like, included in a fine fragrance. Vanillin was say, Akro, the niche perfume line he’s featured in Guerlain’s Jicky, which debuted DIGITAL working on with his daughter. “I see it as in 1889 and was the first perfume to feature APPRENTICE a big help, not as a competition,” he says. both synthetic and natural ingredients. It While Cresp seems to be embracing was a major turning point in the industry: TO HELP THEM the shift, Kilian Hennessy, creator of the With synthetics, the sky was the limit in By Kilian luxury-fragrance line, doesn’t terms of what perfumers could do. DREAM UP see the need for a digital apprentice. Like And now, with AI, perfumers will have with other niche perfumers, pushing their own personal digital apprentice to INFINITE NEW boundaries and taking creative risks are help them dream up infinite new ways what he does best. For Hennessy, who to use every ingredient in their palette. WAYS TO learned from perfume icons Thierry “Creativity is the number-one reason Wasser and Jacques Cavallier, the ideas we developed a partnership with IBM, USE EVERY flow like champagne. “Mozart used to because it enhances the realm of possi- say that he could hear the opera in his bilities,” says Viola. The result of that INGREDIENT IN head and he was just writing the notes collaboration is Philyra, a program that he heard,” he says. “I can give you uses machine learning to scan the nearly THEIR PALETTE. combinations that have never been done

PHOTOGRAPHY, OWEN BRUCE OWEN PHOTOGRAPHY, two million formulas in the fragrance by anyone—I don’t need AI to do that.” ®

e l l e c a n a d a . c o m 61