Navigating scent in 3D
17 November, 2023
“A great perfume is a work of art. It can lift our days, haunt our nights and create the milestones of our memories. Perfume is liquid emotions.” Michael Edwards
Many years ago, I read a book called “Perfume: The Story of Murderer” by German writer Patrick Süskind. Set in 18th century France, a man with an exceptional sense of smell becomes a perfumer... and kills a few people along the way. Süskind masterfully describes the world of scent. The intermingling with our memories. How it heightens the way we perceive the world and people around us.
“This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, not that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water... and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris... This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk... and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk - and try as he would he couldn't fit those two together: milk and silk!”
I have also found fascinating the idea of a signature scent. That a specific fragrance could embody a personality or presence. But how does one embark on the journey to select a scent from the thousands available? Moreover, how does one even begin to navigate a landscape without any obvious landmarks, signposts or paths?
Classification of fragrances
The definitive industry guide to understanding fragrances is Michael Edwards’ Fragrance Wheel, documenting the relationship between innate fragrance preferences and the fragrance families. Edwards, a perfume taxonomist, based the wheel on the Bouquet de la Parfumerie, a French technical guide used by professional perfumers. It was an amazingly rich and detailed reference that catalogued over 19,500 perfumes but he realised that it was far too complex for retailers and consumers.
This spurred Edwards to create something simpler: The Fragrance Wheel, a 2-dimensional chart based on four primary notes: fresh, floral, oriental and woody. Borrowing from the metaphor of music and our sense of hearing, Edwards used combinations of “notes” or fragrance ingredients to create an “accord”. This representation of fragrance has since become an industry standard tool.
The successful adoption of the Fragrance Wheel has an industry standard is based on providing retailers, manufacturers and consumers with a common vocabulary linked to spatial representation. For example, although the average person can name only a handful of common odors, studies indicate that this limitation results from an inability to describe the names of odors rather than a failure to detect differences.
Edwards’ classification approach has since been supported by recent scientific papers documenting how fragrances can be plotted across two axes: ‘not floral to floral’ along the x axis and ‘warm to cool’ on the y axis.
Despite the world-wide acceptance and usage of the Fragrance Wheel, Edwards is aware that it his model is still not able to fully describe a single fragrance profile or compare multiple fragrances simultaneously. In several interviews he has borrowed language from other human senses, describing the similarities in navigating the complex world of fragrances with wine tasting and music, using words like pitch, tone, notes and chords.
I wondered: could fragrances be represented in 3-dimensions and then displayed in augmented reality? And could this be done in a way that both complemented the rich and complex world of fragrances but still easy to understand for those without a perfumer’s technical knowledge?
The everyday consumer experience
My own experience in finding a new perfume has been woeful. I usually walk into a department store and become overwhelmed by all the shelves, bottles, pop-up stands and promotions. I resort to brands that I know or have heard of and half-remembered recommendations from acquaintances. I squirt a sample on my wrist or on those little cards. But after 2 or 3 tests, I can barely remember which one I sampled let alone the one I liked. Smelling them one after another is a bit like taking shots of different spirits, after a while they start intermingling anyway.
This changed when a friend recommended I visit a boutique that specialised in perfume and who would, he assured me, help me find out which fragrances I liked. Sure enough, the owner asked me some insightful questions (What fragrances do you like? Do you like the smell of fruit? When do you wear fragrance? How do you want to feel when you wear it?) and then showed me a diagram that charted their range – which I now understand to be a variation of the Edwards Fragrance Wheel – and guided me to a specific sub-section within it. From there, I only had to sample a few perfumes, before settling on one.
This experience crystallised an important point for me. I needed someone (an expert) to help me navigate an unfamiliar terrain. She did this by asking questions and then pointing out landmarks that anchored my understanding of where we were going.
Framing the challenge: Displaying fragrance profiles in augmented reality
This is what is known from the outset.
People’s sense of smell gets “tired” after sampling 3 different fragrances.
People generally have a limited vocabulary to describe fragrances.
Subjective rather than objective. “Spicy” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.
Although Edwards’ Fragrance Wheel “solves” some of these issues, it could be extended to capture the further nuance between fragrances, particularly those that are part of the same family.
My objective is to create an augmented reality (AR) prototype to assist customers in understanding the relationships between different fragrances and identifying their own personal preferences.
Translating the Fragrance Wheels from 2 to 3 dimensions poses an important design challenge: How to represent a fragrance in 3D space? What are the dimensions that need to be represented? The difficulty is in representing a human sense (smell) using visual cues. And in a way that is intuitive enough for anyone to understand.
Research and initial concept design
I watched several interviews with Edwards but one section in particular piqued my interest at 16:55.
Using the metaphor of music and the different pitches to distinguish between alternating notes, Edwards’ describes several layers when distinguishing between fragrances within the same family. The examples he used were:
Fresh = Diorissimo by Dior (Lilly of the Valley)
Crisp = Marc Jacobs (Gardenia)
Classical = Paris by Yves Saint Laurent (Rose)
Rich = Fraca (rich Tuber Rose)
If we take the Fragrance Wheel and add a 3rd dimension of “depth” we can extend the wheel into columns that represent each family, which I have illustrated in the diagram below.
Using this approach, I created a 3D mapping of the fragrance “Blackberry & Bay” by Jo Malone. This approach was useful in displaying a single fragrance but could it discriminate between two fragrances?
Digital Prototype
I created a digital prototype using Unity game engine playing with the idea of life size scale, placement of the colour wheel along with varying elements along 3 axis.
References
The Basenotes Podcast. “The Art Perfumes formerly known as niche”. 19 September, 2014.
Blair, Sarah. 2019, July 15. “Michael Edwards: Fragrances of the world Founder”. https://mapoftheheart.com/blogs/stories/michael-edwards-fragrances-of-the-world-founder
Brody, Jane E. 1983, February 22. “Sense of Smell Proves to Be Surprisingly Subtle”. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/22/science/sense-of-smell-proves-to-be-surprisingly-subtle.html
Edwards, Michael. “Fragrance Colour Wheel.” Explore Michael Edwards’ Fragrance Wheel - Discover Michael Edwards’ world of fragrances (fragrancesoftheworld.com)
Esxence 2014 Conference. 2014, March 22. “Esxence 2014 – Lecture Michael Edwards”. Michael Edwards with Mark Behnke: 30th anniversary of Fragrances of the World. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEOAWOX8KSk
Mamlouk, Amir Madany. 2003, June. “Quantifying olfactory perception: Mapping olfactory perception space by using multidimensional scaling and self-organizing maps”. Neurocomputing 52-4:591-597
Süskind, Patrick. “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”.
Treggiden, Katie. “Kyugum Hwang creates coloured Scent Palette for customising perfumes” https://www.dezeen.com/2015/07/06/kyugum-hwang-scent-palette-customised-perfumes-coloured-containers-royal-college-art-graduate-shows-2015/
Wu, Anqi. 2018. “Learning a latent manifold of odor representations from neural responses in piriform cortex.” 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018), Montréal, Canada.
Zarzo, Manuel. 2019, October 19. “Understanding the Perceptual Spectrum of Commercial Perfumes as a Basis for a Standard Sensory Wheel of Fragrances”. Cosmetics, 2020, 7, 3
Zarzo, Manuel. 2015, April 05. “A Sensory 3D Map of the Odor Description Space Derived from a Comparison of Numeric Odor Profile Databases”. Chemical Senses, Volume 40, Issue 5, June 2015, Pages 305–313