The Reason I Created My “Scent of a Girl” Perfume
Modern Alchemist Daigo Igarashi Hacks The Five Senses
by Tatsuro Negishi
In April 2015, over 100,000 Japanese internet users have gathered for the Niconico Chokaigi event where a single product drew everybody’s attention: the curiously named “Female University Student No.10” perfume that’s replicated the “scent of a girl.”
The fragrance was developed by Daigo Igarashi (also known by his handle/stage name “Hiroko Ashiyama”) who’s been busy researching the topic of “hacking the five senses.” It all started with a simple question: “Why do girls smell so nice?” which lead Mr. Igarashi to focus his attention on scents that are attractive to the opposite sex. One by one, he analyzed bodily secretions like sweat or fat, then mixed perfume essences whose smells most resembled those substances. The result was his sweet and little bit sweaty “scent of a girl.”
By day, Daigo Igarashi is a 25-year-old employee at an animation production company, but beneath that you’ll find a man with “an interest in human perception,” and an unusual personal backstory that includes once winning a beauty contest during a co-ed university mixer. We have asked Mr. Igarashi about how he developed “Female University Student No.10.”
The Unforgettable Experience With A “Scent Of A Girl”
It all started about four years ago. At the time, the new big thing on the geek market was a product that claimed to have replicated the “scent of a girl,” but Mr. Igarashi’s nose didn’t agree.
“They claimed to have replicated the scent of a girl when all they did was create fruity and pleasant fragrances that smelled like shampoo or deodorant. But the human body doesn’t always smell nice because of things like sweat or oils produced by the skin. I remember thinking that it might be because of those smells that we are attracted to the opposite sex.”
That’s when Mr. Igarashi recalled something that happened to him in high school. An older girl student, who knew about Mr. Igarashi’s experience with cross-dressing, asked him: “Do you want to try on my school uniform?” and lent him her uniform together with a thin shirt she used to wear underneath it.
“She was in the tennis club and was very athletic. Exactly my type of girl. She washed the shirt before lending it to me but underneath its sweet fragrance there was still a hint of her body odor. I thought to myself: ‘Ah, so this is the scent of a girl…’ It smelled wonderfully.”
In that moment, Mr. Igarashi understood that the key to creating his perfume may lie in the components that naturally make up the human body odor. After his subsequent disappointment with the “scent of a girl” fragrances available on the market, he started thinking about creating a more raw smell that would be closer to the one from his high school memories.
“Human body odor is mainly made up of smells produced by fatty substances, which gave me the idea to try using fatty acid salts in my formula. However, all I did in the beginning was add new ingredients to the perfume available on the market, which didn’t lead my any closer to creating the ‘scent of a girl’ that I was looking for. I had to get back to basics and rethink my entire approach.”
Mr. Igarashi first became serious about mixing fragrances in 2014. After tinkering with the formula a few times, his perfume was finally ready, but Mr. Igarashi felt that his fragrance smelled too “adult” to belong to a high school girl, so he named it “Female University Student No. 10.”
“Everyone had different reactions to it. Some smelled the perfume and just got it, while others didn’t really understand it. There were also some women who said that the smell reminded them of the girls’ locker room or hugging their female friends in high school. In any case, I felt that I found a way to stir a person’s imagination through their sense of smell.”
“Scent Of A Girl” Just One Of The “Key Technologies” For Hacking The Five Senses
During his university days, Mr. Igarashi was studying the use of animated characters in urban revitalization, as well as philosophy and artistic expression. When faced with the question of “directly conveying an idea to people,” he started thinking about creating “something that would engage (hack) the five human senses.”
“I cross-dress because I love girls, not because I want to attract guys. I want to know what it’s like to be a girl. From the point of view of human perception, cross-dressing allows me to fool people’s sense of sight a little bit. I look at cross-dressing as basically hacking people’s perception.”
Mr. Igarashi uses cross-dressing and perfume to hack the senses of sight and smell. By also incorporating the senses of taste, hearing, and touch into his hacking, he says he pretty much arrived at his ultimate goal: a method of using various tools to stimulate the senses and convincingly make a person experience abstract concepts.
In February 2015, Mr. Igarashi started the “Yukari Hot Springs” (orig. “Yukari Onsen”) physical experience program with the goal of “summoning” the virtual idol Yukari Yuzuki to the real world. The program is meant to be an elaborate simulation of going on a trip with Yukari Yuzuki through concentrated physical sensations, like by seeing her blurred silhouette from behind a shower curtain, smelling her used bath towel, even tasting her kisses etc.
Mr. Igarashi uses his own unique “key technologies” like perfume, special screens that can project realistic images of a silhouette, or water that tastes and smells like spit, to create an environment where people can experience Yukari Yuzuki with all of their senses.
“The ‘Yukari Hot Springs’ project was an attempt to bring my fantasy into the real world. I strongly believe that a direct approach was most appropriate for this, which is why I didn’t use any virtual reality or augmented reality tech like the Oculus Rift. Instead, I tried to hack the five senses by analogue means, starting with my ‘scent of a girl’ perfume. Smell in particular is one of our most primal and powerful senses, so going forward, I want to focus more on it as one of my ‘key technologies.’ To create the feeling of a human presence by merely arranging physical objects basically sounds like magic. Personally, though, I call it ‘alchemy.’ So you could say that my experiments with creating a scent of girl were the first step towards creating a ‘female homunculus.’*
*An artificial human created through alchemy.
Mr. Igarashi’s journey started with a basic desire to replicate the “wonderful scent” of his youth, and ended with him creating a world of total expression by “hacking the five senses.” Today, the modern alchemist who lives between fantasy and reality continues to explore the psychology of human perception and research/utilize various technologies that even right now are helping him hack someone’s senses.
(photo: Daisuke Hayata translation: Cezary Jan Strusiewicz)
Originally published at ignition.co.
