How Perfumers Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Create Fragrance

Perfumes may smell like raspberries or jasmine but, paradoxically, fragrances are the last frontier of natural beauty products. Unlike skin care, hair care, and cosmetics -- which chemists can formulate entirely with botanically derived ingredients, rather than synthetics -- the perfume industry has been fueled by the exact opposite: synthetic mimicry of natural ingredients. When you smell lavender or rose in a perfume, maybe 90 percent of the time what you're actually 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 synthetic aromatic molecules were introduced. For the first time, precious scents were available at prices that the rising middle class could afford.