Good news for those of you still scratching your heads over the continued success of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds or those of you with the potent stench of Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth still occupying olfactory space…even decades after the perfume has been on the market. There is a new fragrance boss in town.
A profession heavily reliant on human sense of smell could one day be outsourced to artificial intelligence (AI) if engineers from the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at IBM have their way.
The team of engineers has been developing an AI system that could potentially be responsible for selecting the scents in air fresheners, laundry detergent and perfume.
Working in collaboration with global flavor and fragrance producer Symrise to determine fragrance trends as well as materials used to manufacture fragrances, the team created an AI system dubbed Philyra.
“Philyra does more than serve up inspiration — it can design entirely new fragrance formulas by exploring the entire landscape of fragrance combinations to discover the whitespaces in the global fragrance market," wrote IBM Research principal research scientist Richard Goodwin.
To develop Philyra, the team programmed the AI to develop an aptitude for predicating fragrance trends based on already popular fragrances.
“In the case of fragrances, the art and science of designing a winning perfume is something humans have explored for hundreds of years," Goodwin wrote. "Now, perfumers can have an AI apprentice by their side that can analyze thousands of formulas and historical data to identify patterns and predict novel combinations, helping to make them more productive, and accelerate the design process by guiding them towards formulas that have never been seen before.”
Already, Philyra has been used to create two unique fragrances from a database of smells. Those scents were reviewed by a master perfumer who made edits to the fragrances when necessary, and the results will be available next year through global beauty company O Boticario.
"Symrise’s longer-term goal is to introduce this technology to their master perfumers around the globe and continue to use the solution for the design of fragrances for personal care and home care products," the companies explained. "Symrise also plans to introduce Philyra into their Perfumery School to help train the next generation of perfumers, firmly embedding AI into the heart of its organization."
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