Finding a new-season foundation or signature scent has long required a stroll through the beauty aisles of our favourite department stores. And while the rise of beauty e-retailers, like Cult Beauty and Look Fantastic, have made products readily available at the click of a button, the experience of swatching shades of products on the backs of our hands to find the best fit remains unrivalled. That all changed when the pandemic forced the closure of the industry and shopping online became our sole way of procuring the products that kept us sane amid multiple lockdowns. But the gap in shopping effectively for beauty buys that usually require a process of trial and error means COVID-19 has rapidly accelerated AI's entry in the public beauty domain. The newest innovations in beauty tech go above and beyond our usual shopping experiences to deliver a fully personalised and unique approach.

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.