Tech Special: Scent

Unlike sound and vision, which can be reproduced via wavelengths and pixels, the reproduction of scent still relies on good old-fashioned molecules that must be transported from source to nose. Yet the tech surrounding scent is developing – apps can detect BO or play you scent tracks – and there’s a deeper understanding of aroma’s role in marketing.

But what of demand? The film industry’s launch of ‘scentsational’ smell-o-vision flopped and nobody wanted CDs playing ‘scent stories’. Scent consultant Lizzie Ostrom wonders if consumers prefer to sniff out authentic, direct-from-source smells over imitations

The smelling glove must be the most freaky product I’ve encountered while working in the fragrance industry: a pair of washing-up gloves with catheters running from the fingers to your nostrils. The concept: hold a beautiful flower and breathe in the aroma without having to bring the thing to your face. “Why the hell do we need this?” was my initial thought. It’s a question that even the most well thought-out scent tech has always to answer. The holy grail of such products is the removal of actually having to inhale scent molecules, detaching the odour from the object source.

Yes, any old candle or room spray lets us delight in the perfume of a rose in the depths of winter when we’re nowhere near a garden. But why use old-school wax when you could employ a Scentee, a Japanese app-powered device that releases aroma-puffs from tiny cartridges attached to your phone, for example when a friend sends a text? Or a Cyrano, dubbed a ‘digital scent speaker’, which lets you activate scent tracks from an app, playing sequences of aromas from a portable scent diffuser? There is also Smeller 2.0, an instrument that enables producers to create narratives of smell – compositions made up of scents and scent chords known as Osmodramas – as live performances.

Most often, the ‘tech’ part of scent tech actually refers to the internet-enabled bit, which allows us to customise which aromas we want to be released. For the machines themselves, we are still stuck with a limited palette of delivery systems in various sizes: put the scent in liquid, gel, aerosol, polymer bead or capsule form, then use heat, a fan or ultrasonic waves to encourage the volatile molecules to evaporate. Designers can then multiply the number of tubes and scent sources to offer a musical instrument effect and an ability to layer aroma. An article in this April’s MIT Technology Review examines the limitations of ‘artificial olfaction’, the most important of which is that, unlike sound and visuals, we can’t reproduce scent in wavelengths, and are stuck dealing with molecules that we must convey from A to B.

The tech may be limited, but the applications are certainly not. There’s brand activation, as with Nivea Men’s NOSE app, created by Belgian agency Happiness FCB. If held near a man’s armpit, it can ‘scan’ the smell of his sweat, analysing it with an algorithm created by evaluating the scent of 4,000 other males. It can then report if there is any BO and advise the use of deodorant. There is also the recent spoof Nosulus Rift campaign from games makers Ubisoft to accompany the release of South Park: The Fractured But Whole (spoiler: it involves an aroma generator that emits human farts).

For VR production and experiential agencies there is the prospect of creating mood and atmosphere, the simulacra of a jungle paradise, or a trip into space. In retail and hospitality scent-marketing diffuser machines are now a commercially viable part of the customer experience mix, building familiarity across a brand’s global estate of stores. We are even seeing how scent can enhance human performance thanks to research on the neuroscience of smell: the Cyrano, for example, can emit smells that will help to make you a more attentive driver.

The long and winding road to scent tech success

Scent tech certainly demonstrates ambition in how it aims to enhance our day-to-day lives, but the genre seems to be stuck, even as enthusiasm around olfaction as a design language mounts. Will these products ever appeal to consumers in volume? We’ve had plenty of scent jukeboxes, players and cartridges before, including – over a decade ago – Febreze’s Scentstories. This ‘scent CD’ player emitted a selection of aromas, enabling one to relax at home with a glass of wine while also going on an olfactory journey. The Exploring A Mountain Trail scent CD started with the smell of a winding creek and built up to a wander through a fir forest via a stroll through a wildflower meadow and even a struggle up to a mountain pass. But it didn’t sell. It seems we crave Smell-o-Vision stories in our newspapers, especially on April Fool’s Day, but not in our actual homes.

Even before getting into all the technical difficulties that are involved, Smell-o-Vision is faced with a brand image problem; it’s associated with the costly flop that was the 1960 film Scent Of Mystery. The movie saw the launch of Swiss inventor and osmologist Hans Laube’s ‘smell brain’ machine, which released scents, such as tobacco, in sync with the action in the film. It was billed as the next big thing but never took off and actually made some audience members feel nauseous (the film was later re-released as Holiday In Spain, without the smells).

Part of the problem may be that we don’t even take the sense of smell itself seriously enough. We’re unpractised in sniffing and we don’t have a rich language for it. We’ve suppressed the ‘lizard’ part of our brains. Odour is not permitted to take on its proper role in our lives – we don’t pay it enough attention. Rather than accept the boundaries of our sense of smell, we try to stretch it, to make it behave like our other senses. 

 

Also, because the hype is so focused on technology and hardware, we neglect the most important asset at the heart of these devices: the scents. Often, those leading on brand activations struggle to source aromas for their campaigns (or, in some instances, they don’t really care that much anyway and will just use anything). The fragrance industry business model is predicated on volume, and it is much easier to provide off-the-shelf library or portfolio fragrances – a coconut here, a strawberry there – than put lots of resources into bespoke atmospheric odours that are never going to sell in hundreds of kilos as a shower gel formulation.

This means there are opportunities opening up right now for independent perfumers who can negotiate a supply chain on a small scale. The industry’s fragrance houses are responding, and putting together new business models based on impact over volume, and are also looking into the R&D of new aroma chemicals that could perform particularly well in digitally-powered applications and which would allow for experimentation with aroma effects. But with research currently shrouded in secrecy, it remains to be seen what products will eventually emerge in the future.

Reproducing the scent of a rotting corpse

In the meantime, this summer, the New York Botanical Garden’s titan arum, or corpse flower, bloomed – the last time this happened was in 1939. The event secured global media coverage and crowds of visitors flocked to experience the plant’s aroma of rotting flesh. “If only Smell-o-Vision had caught on!” cried the weblog Boing Boing.
It seems that, far from being careless about our noses and what they can do, we really do want to smell our way through the world. But we want to be there, at the source, nose-to-nose with the real thing, forming a memory that one day might just be triggered again. Or will we simply be happy to load up our scent gadgets with a corpse flower cartridge?