Art or science?

My inspiration for this project was meeting with scent critic and author Chandler Burr at the Thinking Digital conference last year. His book about the scientist Luca Turin who's come up with a new (and controversial) theory of smell fascinated me - check out his TED talk here. Turin works in and around the perfume industry so both of these characters led me into my current obsession with smell via the perfume counter.

The problem with perfume is that, as much as it's powered by enormous industrial laboratories, it's essentially an art form and 'modern' (i.e. after 1920) tend to be impressionist in nature. They are distillations of ideas and concepts, they rarely smell 'like' anything and right now we're interested in realism. As a starting point we want to work with accords that are descriptive of real world objects.

Accords are best described as smell recipes - if you want the smell of, say, cut grass or wet concrete you would need to assemble a number of odorant molecules into a specific blend that gave you that scent. Usually. Some molecules can give you extremely complex smells on their own. It's a bit like cookery - it's all about learning to work with the ingredients.