Ever since making an appointment to create a custom perfume for myself at a new wellness destination in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, I had been looking forward to seeing the scent-making equipment in action. And that robotic contraption, with its whirring sounds and moving parts, was certainly dazzling.Once I’d answered some personal questions and tapped a code on a keypad, the stainless steel-framed device began to send little glass bottles along a conveyor belt, into which were squirted precise amounts of yellow, amber and clear liquids from gleaming glass dispensers, before black spray pumps were crimped on and no-nonsense labels printed with my name affixed. The spectacle alone was practically worth the price of admission ($95).
“We wanted to make something that would connect with the inner child in you,” said Frederik Duerinck, 49, a Dutch artist who works in new media, speaking by phone from the Netherlands. In 2018, he founded ScenTronix, a tech startup that made the machine. And if the five concoctions that the gizmo produced didn’t initially wow me, I was prepared to blame artificial intelligence, which had programmed the device after processing my questionnaire.
Story continues below this ad
Fragrance is having a moment as consumers — not least millennials and Generation Z — incorporate scent exploration into self-care regimens and scrutinize how products are made. Algorithmic Perfumery, as the roving machine installation is known, appears to have shown up right on time.
Its other creator, Anahita Mekanik, 55, is an Iranian-born fragrance developer based in New York, who heads scent design at ScenTronix. She shares Duerinck’s goal of allowing customers to invent their own scents rather than settle for whatever the $61 billion perfume industry has on offer.
“We’re giving people agency in the creative process,” Mekanik said.
With $1.8 million in venture-capital funding and help from talented coders and tinkerers, they devised a rudimentary apparatus in the Netherlands that Duerinck took on the road. The temporary installations, set up at design fairs and art festivals, garnered awards and provided user data that helped the team make the machines ever more sophisticated.Story continues below this ad
Today, their standard devices have 54 cylindrical dispensers that are filled with professional-grade ingredients — some solutions composed of just two raw materials, others a combination of many. Current installations can be found at, among other venues, a “living lab” in the Dutch city of Breda, where ScenTronix is based; the Museum of the Future in Dubai; The Fragrance Shop on London’s Oxford Street; and, through February, 113 Spring, the SoHo wellness boutique where I put the invention through its paces on a recent Saturday morning.
One of a new breed of retail stores that offer customers experiences in addition to goods, 113 Spring opened in September on the ground floor of a cast-iron building dating to the 1870s. Snohetta, an architecture firm with headquarters in Oslo, designed the gallerylike 3,000-square-foot space, enveloping it with a curving screen made of sheer white fabric that provided the backdrop for shadowy projections of drifting leaves on the morning I visited.
Displayed at the front of the store, immaculately packaged products — chocolates to promote better sleep, tinctures to boost happiness and focus — held out the possibility of a more optimally tuned body and mind.
Toward the rear, green chairs that had been printed from recycled plastic surrounded an oblong table. António Moreno, a 113 Spring employee who was to guide me through the perfume-making experience, told me there had been a movement class in the store the previous night and a sound bath earlier in the week.Story continues below this ad
The perfume bar, toward the center of the space, had a counter with upholstered stools so that I could sit and sip rose tea poured from a beaker-like glass pot while, through a QR code on my phone, I answered 20 questions that helped the machine’s three algorithms get to know me. (“Which color represents you the best?” “How would you describe your style?”)
The algorithms must have strained to process my responses and pinpoint “my emotional essence,” as the 113 Spring website promised, because the first scent the machine produced, and that we spritzed on paper strips to sniff, seemed so light that I couldn’t imagine bothering to use it, and the second smelled downright musty. The third — which contained 13 ingredients including apple blossom and a mixture named “blush” — was perfectly pleasant but no more than that.
With the help of Moreno and one of his colleagues, I called up the formula for the first scent on my phone and tweaked the ingredient proportions, dialing down “sheer” and “oxygen” and increasing citrusy bergamot. I hit “produce” on the keypad, we sniffed and tweaked some more, and the machine cranked out yet another blend.
I could have continued my scent exploration in a private room, stretching out on a vibrating sonic lounge chair and donning an EEG headset that would have scanned my brain waves while I inhaled three of my newly minted perfumes and watched colors and textures washing the walls, showing how the fragrances stimulated my mind in different ways ($50 extra). But I’d had enough olfactory excitement for a weekend morning — plus I had my five, 0.17-ounce vials, nestled in a cardboard sleeve case, to take home and test out.Story continues below this ad
Algorithmic Perfumery may not have produced a dream fragrance for me, but the experience heightened my appreciation for the sense of smell (and gave me a holiday gift idea for my daughter, who has recently gotten into scents). And future users may have better luck, because the machine learning improves as participants leave reviews, Duerinck said.
Of the 190,000 people who have engaged with Algorithmic Perfumery so far, 43% who left a review rated at least one of their scents a 93 or more out of 100. Only 8% have gone on to order refills, however.
“What we’re trying to do is really hard,” Duerinck added.
He and Mekanik tout Algorithmic Perfumery as “democratizing” scent making. And while, at $95 for a 60-minute session, the process at 113 Spring is clearly aimed at an upscale consumer, there is something satisfyingly subversive about doing an end run around the perfume industrial complex, with its army of experts, elaborate packaging and advertisements filled with aspirational imagery.Story continues below this ad
What I confronted instead was Algorithmic Perfumery’s disarming, eminently likable machine, which Duerinck described as a “perfume printer.”
Algorithmic Perfumery aside, AI has been making inroads in the scent industry and is sometimes used to speed up the laborious, time-consuming process by which new products are created. But the perfumer still has the final say, according to experts.
“Our ambition is to get you something you love,” Mekanik said.
To that end, last month the team in Breda unveiled a bigger machine — one with 300 glass dispensers — at a beauty trade conference in Dubai. The phone questionnaire was discarded, and customers simply told the device what they wanted in a scent.Story continues below this ad
“You can talk to it, confide in it and it will give you something back,” Duerinck said.
He has fond memories of the smell of cookies and coffee in his grandmother’s kitchen — something he hopes the machine will be able to replicate in the not-distant future.
“The end goal,” he declared, “is to be able to ‘scentify’ a memory or really anything you describe.”