The Future Of Fragrance

How perfumers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to create scents may be the last frontier of natural beauty products, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to craft a scent with natural ingredients. Here, Glamour explores the science and innovation of incorporating AI into the fragrancemaking process.

- Jessica Chia

perfumes may smell like raspberries or jasmine but, paradoxically, fragrances are the last frontier of natural beauty products. Unlike skincare, hair care, and cosmetics – which chemists can formulate entirely with botanically derived ingredients, rather than synthetics – the perfume industry has been fuelled by the opposite: synthetic mimicry of natural ingredients. When you smell lavender or rose in a perfume, maybe 90% of the time what you’re smelling is a linalool or geranyl acetate compound, lab-made replicas of the flowers in bloom.

It’s been that way since the late 1800s when the industry introduced synthetic aromatic molecules. For the first time, precious scents were available at prices that the rising middle class could afford. “The artificial products were stronger, longer lasting and cheaper,” says Mandy Aftel, a perfumer and author of Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent (R475, loot.co.za). “With the move from natural to synthetics, the great perfumes were born – Chanel No. 5, Shalimar.”