Last spring, one of my favourite brand tie-ins of 2023 saw high-street cosmetics chain Lush team up with Nintendo to create a range of products based around Super Mario. It was a riot of brightly coloured shower gels and super-sweet fragrances, including a divine Princess Peach body spray that I'm still using because screw gender-based perfume norms. Now, Lush has released a new video game range celebrating 15 years of Minecraft. There are 12 items in the collection, including easily the most literal bath bomb Lush has ever made – a TNT block – as well as Grass and Lava blocks, a Creeper head shower bomb and a Diamond Pickaxe bubble bar, which is genuinely quite hefty despite its diminutive size. The collection is apparently the result of a year-long collaboration with the game's developer Mojang, and it's been a popular project for the company's employees. Lush concepts creative director Melody Morton is a regular player – and she's not the only one.

Some scents are at risk of vanishing forever. Artificial intelligence can whip up the formula to recreate a perfume based on its chemical composition. One day, it could use a lone sample to reproduce rare smells at risk of being lost, such as incense from a culturally specific ritual or the smell of a forest that is changing because of rising temperatures. Idelfonso Nogueira at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and his colleagues profiled two existing fragrances, categorising them by scent family – subjective words such as "spicy" or "musk" commonly used to describe perfume – and so-called "odour value", a measure of how intense a certain smell is. For instance, one of the fragrances scored the highest odour value for "coumarinic", a family of scents similar to vanilla.

Making perfume is an art that can be traced back to ancient Greece but now modern-day perfumiers are beginning to look beyond their noses to develop the scents most likely to appeal to us. They are, instead, turning to AI. Perfumes can now be designed to trigger emotional responses using ingredients known as neuroscents – odours shown by biometric measures to arouse different positive feelings such as calm, euphoria or sleepiness. Hugo Ferreira, a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering in Lisbon, is mapping brain activity and response to perfumes to build a database of neuroscents. He says the sense of smell is fascinating. "With sight and hearing, you can imagine the face of a loved one or favourite tune. It's hard to imagine a smell even though [it] can provoke a torrent of emotions and memories."

"Created by robots for humans" is a special edition body spray for young men which has been developed using augmented reality and artificial intelligence in a bid to produce the perfect scent and packaging. Axe A.I. (LYNX A.I. in the UK), is the result of a specially designed AI applied to analyze 6,000 perfume ingredients with 3.5million potential combinations with the goal of discovering the ideal fragrance. The result combines an aromatic floral blend of sage, artemisia, and mint, refreshed with marine, apple and citrus notes and finished with a woody, ambery, and moss background. Not only did the brand use AI algorithms to help create the scent but they are doubling down on technology and are using Augmented Reality (AR) to help market it. Powered by Zappar's WebAR technology, all limited edition Lynx/Axe A.I. packs will feature a smartphone scannable QR code that will launch a web page where British rapper Aitch will introduce the product and ask the user to spray an AR can of LYNX/Axe in the air to reveal a code allowing entry in a special competition.

Can we use machine learning methods to predict the sensing data of odor mixtures and design new smells? A new study by researchers from Tokyo Tech does just that. The novel method is bound to have applications in the food, health, beauty, and wellness industries, where odors and fragrances are of keen interest. The sense of smell is one of the basic senses of animal species. It is critical to finding food, realizing attraction, and sensing danger. Humans detect smells, or odorants, with olfactory receptors expressed in olfactory nerve cells.

TV can be considered as the container that keeps the essence of an era including our identity and culture; As we evolve as a society, TV is constantly reinventing itself. Our relationship with TV reflects how we integrate into a society, which is immersed more and more in technology. Against all odds, TV was not replaced by the new Information and Communication Technologies, but rather absorbed them organically, remaining, as well as the main space for creating experiences and community. That is why more than TEN generations have grown up in the warm light and soft static of their screen. The television retains the best demographers applied social science has to offer, and these researchers can determine precisely what Americans in 1990 are, want, see: what we as Audience want to see ourselves as.

The tech world – as evidenced by billionaires taking 10 minute holidays to space, and that tiny little car that delivered the football onto the pitch during the Euros – is more advanced than ever before. Even the beauty industry is becoming more technologically minded, with the announcement of the world's first ever "connected fragrance" from Paco Rabanne. Released today, Phantom, a new perfume with an appropriately robot-shaped body, is a world-first from the luxury brand, using artificial intelligence to create a state of the art "Augmented Creativity" process. What that actually means is that the perfume works with the neuroscience of your scent receptors to change how you feel as well as how you smell. The team at Paco Rabanne developed a decidedly Black Mirror-sounding Science of Wellness programme for the release.

Following the big launch of the latest pillar by Paco Rabanne, we received more interesting info about the creation, inspiration, and futuristic direction of the newest fragrance PHANTOM. Paco Rabanne's team developed PHANTOM with the perfumers, scientists, and technicians of the International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) company, using the company's state-of-the-art Augmented Creativity process. With PHANTOM, every aspect of perfume creation has been reinvented by next-generation technologies developed for IFF. Thanks to neurosciences, algorithmic tools, and artificial intelligence, our perfumers have been able to push back their creative boundaries. How do you use neurosciences in perfumery?

What does the future smell like? That depends on who you ask. PUIG's perfumiers, who produce scents for Paco Rabanne, believe that the future smells sexy, confident and energetic. That's how they're choosing to market Phantom, the fashion house's latest fragrance-cum-piece of retro-futurist art. Phantom comes in a robot-shaped bottle that, when you tap your phone on the NFC tag embedded into its head, welcomes you into its own digital world.

Artificial intelligence programs are gradually becoming part of the perfume development process. In what way does perfumers' work engage with these new methods? How can we reconcile this rational, mathematical approach with a creative process requiring sensitivity and subjectivity? Is the future of perfumers at risk? Jean-Christophe Hérault, senior perfumer at IFF, explains the implications of what is sometimes referred to as a revolution, while reminding us of the importance of human intuition. What do artificial intelligence programs used in fragrance creation consist of?