An Artificial Intelligence is inventing new perfumes that’ll soon sell in stores

One of the most famous artificial intelligences is IBM Watson, with success stories as Jeopardy and real, tangible and applicable as the recommendation of treatments to cancer patients or the application in the world of insurance. It’s clear that the most mechanical and objective works are perfect for IA, but what about creativity? art? Today we have one of those cases that move foundations: IBM Watson starts inventing new fragrances.

One of the most refined arts is the invention of perfumes. The so-called “noses”, masters of smells, are capable of using science to trigger specific emotions and moods, even evoking memories. The company Symrise, a major global player in the marketing of fragrances such as Estée Lauder, Avon, Coty and Donna Karan, has turned to IBM to study whether an Artificial Intelligence could act as a “nose”. The approach is very well explained in Vox:

Symrise has 1.7 million fragrance formulas that it’s collected over the years. These include scents that were sold to companies like Estée Lauder and Coty, which then market and package them as fancy perfumes, as well as flavors and concoctions used for things like toothpaste, pet food, detergent, candles, snack foods, and soda.

Symrise shared this list of fragrance formulas, along with information on how they performed sales-wise, with IBM. Philyra added these to a database and compared them to additional customer data provided by Symrise, like which scents were best-sellers and where, who was buying them, and which age demographic prefers which scents the most. Philyra can then use that information to create new formulas targeted to specific demographics.

The result is Philyra, an AI that learns to create new perfumes in the same way a human apprentice would. Although IBM is very cautious in saying that this could replace the fragrances experts, and they proposal is to use it as an assistant (as happened with Morgan trailer), an intelligence that could help the “noses”; in the mid-term it’s clearly a game changer. Symrise has already sold two perfumes developed by Philyra to O Boticário, the second largest beauty store in Brazil, and will start selling them in 4.000 stores next year.

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