The artificial intelligence is present every day in new areas that perhaps we thought that they could not be until a few years later, one of these sectors is the manufacture of perfumes.
Companies dedicated to perfumery are increasingly resorting to the application of technological resources to design and create unique fragrances, whose production is massive and achieve high sales volumes.
In 2019, the fragrance company Givaudan Fragrances launched Carto, a digital tool powered by artificial intelligence to help perfume designers.
This intuitive and interactive system seeks to reinvent the way perfumers create new fragrances. Carto stores 1500 ingredients and, through a touch screen, the different aromas can be linked together to create new formulas in a way that differs from traditional spreadsheets or pyramid-shaped olfactory representations. Carto also includes an instant sampling robot that allows for a smooth production of fragrance tests, quickly, that cannot be matched by traditional sampling methods.
The president of the fragrance division, Mauricio Volpi, said that Carto “allows them to bring together physical-chemical science and technology to maximize the use of our ingredient palette, while making experimentation easier and more fun”.
Carto was not designed as a substitute for the perfumer, the artificial intelligence of the system would act as the digital complement that would allow perfumers to improve their creative work, experimenting more efficiently in the elaboration of the new formulas.
Carto is not the only artificial intelligence in the market of perfumes, the house of fragrances of German origin, Symrise together with IBM Research designed an AI called Philyra, after the Greek goddess of perfume, which seeks to study the aromatic formulas and analyze customer data to produce new fragrances. This system was taught in a similar way to perfumers’ apprentices, who study up to 10 years to achieve new aromas.
Similar to Carto, Philyra cannot actually smell, but the latter stores data on the family of scents, encoding it alongside one’s personal product requirements such as soaps, lotions and creams.
Claire Viola, vice president of digital strategy at Symrise, acknowledges that the technology is not error-free, saying, “It’s still a project, the more we try it, the better it gets. It constantly needs training. You have to qualify each new material, so that it understands the difference between different floral and oriental aromas, for example”.
What it does offer are new combinations that, humanly speaking, they hadn’t thought of before. The machine stores, in its database, approximately two million aroma formulas, so the potential to cover a wider range of fragrances and possible combinations is much greater.
During 2019, Brazilian cosmetics company O Boticário worked with Symrise to launch the first fragrance designed with the help of artificial intelligence.
In the city of Breda, located in the Netherlands, we found ScenTronix a laboratory that allows its customers to create their own personalized fragrance. To enjoy the experience, customers must answer a form with questions such as environment where they grew up and life roles, the laboratory analyzes the answers with an algorithmic formula and creates the unique fragrance for each client in just 7 minutes.
“I thought it would be a good idea to completely change the dynamic so that the perfume becomes who you are and not the brand,” explains ScenTronix co-founder Frederik Duerinck.
Undoubtedly, these technological tools are not intended to replace the perfumer, but they do offer a unique and unrepeatable experience for clients and a complementary support for the work of creators, allowing them to be more creative, efficient and fast when designing unique fragrances.
