It was March 2022 and I was in Dubai to visit the pandemic-delayed Expo 2020. I was in the lobby of the Museum of the Future—which had opened just three weeks before I arrived—and in front of me was something I hadn’t heard of before: Algorithmic Perfumery.

The idea was simple. You paid them $50 (43 €) and they would give you a short questionnaire to fill out. You handed it back and then they used your answers as input to “AI [that] supplements your data with existing learning to create scents that are hyper-personal”. The fragrances were created by a machine with 32 distinct scent components (they now have a large-scale machine capable of mixing over 500 ingredients). The machine would send 5 ml (0.17 oz) bottles down an assembly line; you could watch as it created your three personalized fragrances.

I thought it was a cool idea and happily paid up. I watched enthusiastically as the machine created my selections. When they were complete, an attendant packaged them into a presentation box. My own unique fragrances, drawn from what I assumed was at least billions of possible combinations—how exciting!

I opened the box right there at the museum and… they were fine. Just… fine. I didn’t mind any of them, but I didn’t particularly want to wear any of them, either. I took the fragrances back home at the end of the trip, thinking someday I’d give them more of a try, but I just didn’t like them enough to want to wear them. Eventually they fell victim to a spring cleaning, never to be seen again.

What went wrong? To answer that leads to still deeper questions: Is AI capable of creating a signature scent that can hold its own in a world crowded with luxury fragrances? Why do we choose luxury fragrances to begin with?

This isn’t a review of Algorithmic Perfumery. I think it’s fascinating technology and I assume there are people who love the fragrances it has created for them. I didn’t, but that’s irrelevant.

My point is that if there were some groundswell of support for Algorithmic Perfumery, or for similar technology, I would have expected it to have long since appeared in a kiosk below la Coupole in Galeries Lafayette on boulevard Haussmann. Why hasn’t it? I have three ideas.

Perhaps combining scent components into desirable fragrances is a process that is completely reliant upon the experiences, emotions, and senses inherent in being a human being. If this is true, automating the creation of fragrances might be extremely difficult or even impossible with our current level of technology.

I tend to doubt this. We have a long history of people saying things are impossible and then being shown the fool. (See Clarke’s first law for the definitive version of this observation.) Also, whenever I see an argument going down this path, I immediately think of quantum mysticism, especially the concept that somehow our brains are special because of something that relates to quantum physics. I’ve always taken the view that “if meat can do it, silicon can eventually do it”.

For a few years, my closest Nordstrom was in San Antonio, Texas. There was—perhaps there still is—a particular gentleman who worked at their men’s fragrance counter, where they had all the fragrance brands combined into a small area with one salesperson. (Men just don’t get the love at US fragrance counters.) When I say he was a scent whisperer, I mean it. He would take the most fragmentary of input and produce something a man would love. Sometimes it would take two or three iterations for him to converge on a solution. Other times it took just one. I visited once with someone and all he said to the salesperson was “I’m in the Navy and I don’t like most fragrances.” In seconds, the salesperson said he knew just what to try and produced a bottle of Acqua di Giò Profondo Eau de Parfum by Giorgio Armani. It was saline, citric, and fresh, and everything my companion didn’t know he wanted in a scent yet suddenly did, and voilà, he walked out with his first luxury fragrance.

I tell this story because I believe that we’ll see an AI that is a scent whisperer like that salesperson at some point. When? I can’t say. But again, my position is that if meat can do it, silicon can do it.

Perhaps the idea is a good one, and achievable today, but as created by Netherlands-based ScenTronix (the company behind Algorithmic Perfumery), the implementation isn’t good enough. It could be that their AI code, whatever form it may take, isn’t sophisticated enough to reliably combine scent components in ways that are compelling to people.

This seems possible to me. One thing that was missing from my experience was any sort of feedback loop. If the process had been…

“We’ve created a set of test strips for you to smell. Here’s an app you can use to tell us your reactions. We’ll use your reactions to create another set of strips, and we’ll keep doing this until we converge on a scent that you find irresistible.”

…I suspect I might have liked the results far more.

I’ll come back to this idea below with an experiment you can try yourself. But that brings us to the idea that I think is closest to the truth…