I asked AI to make me a perfume, here’s what happened (2024)

Who (besides Good Housekeeping) do you lean on for the best fragrance recommendations? Your friends? Your partner? Social media? All perfectly reasonable answers, but perhaps it’s time to try a new approach: AI. The bots might not have noses, but that hasn’t stopped them becoming perfumers, using complex algorithms to tap into your subconscious and create something you’ll instinctively connect with. Imagine the perfume you never knew you needed, until a tall, dark, shiny super-processor rocked up, giving all the sexy ChatGPT and virtually nuzzled your neck. Or at least that’s the theory. (Ish. This may be the Jilly Cooper version.)

I’ve discovered this intriguing proposition at The Fragrance Shop, which now offers the world’s first-ever “AI guided scent creation technology”. For the cost of £45, the Algorithmic Perfumery by EveryHuman service will poke around your inner self, then bespoke-blend three wannabe signature scents designed to intuitively resonate with you. Why choose a perfume based on how it smells when technology can tap into how it feels?

You might laugh, but you’ve bought perfume on the basis of A-listers wafting around Paris in frothy frocks, having a soft-focus faux-mance on moonlit boulevards, so let’s save the judgment shall we?

What’s involved in the AI perfume service?

I went for the full EveryHuman experience, which works as follows: you visit The Fragrance Shop’s flagship Oxford Street store in London, get probed by AI, then watch a Willy Wonka-style machine create your custom blends in front of your eyes. Alternatively, you can do it virtually and await your three 5ml ‘personality distilled as perfume’ samplers via the good old-fashioned post. (A drone would have been cooler, but you can’t have everything – yet.)

Before anyone gets nervous, I suppose I should make it clear that EveryHuman’s AI analysis doesn’t involve anything terrifying like brain scans or electrodes. It’s actually a quiz on an iPad in a perfume store (or your phone, if you opt to do this at home), but it’s like no other beauty consultation I’ve ever had before.

Instead of sniffing notes, I answer a long series of questions intended to reveal my real self, then AI does the rest, creating a scent that will supposedly light up my neural pathways. Okay, I am quizzed about my general tastes in fragrance and also offered a sliding scale to indicate how, say, sweet, woody or citrus I’d like my perfumes to be, but you can choose to skip this entirely if that feels a bit like a cop-out.

Personally, I did opt to give EveryHuman a heads up about my fragrance preferences, lest it got it into its virtual brain that my inner self craves overpowering ouds. I don’t think that’s cheating; it’s only like me giving my husband a few gentle ‘hints’ at Christmas versus handing over a Sharpie-annotated copy of the catalogue.

Besides, the thoughtful AI machine clearly wanted to delve much, much deeper into my needs and wants, beyond my penchant for citrus and vanilla notes. It wanted to know everything: where I grew up, my daydreams, my favourite colour, my personality traits, my taste in holidays, my mindset as I was answering these questions… By the end, I wasn’t sure if AI wanted to make me a perfume or date me.

Since humans are complex beings (and the kind AI machine so desperately wanted to get it right), the algorithm offered me not one but three options as my potential scent soulmates. I was humming the Blind Date theme tune as the machine mixed up my matches, shuttling vials down a conveyor belt and dispensing notes from dozens of colourful vats.

At the end, I was presented with three 5ml bottles to take away, and a link to my personalised formulas with all the notes and percentages listed. Your not-so-secret recipes are stored on the system, and can be tweaked in-store for an extra £12 if you fancy a bit more or less of any of the notes, once you’ve had a sniff. (I decided to try this, to see if I could better the machine’s efforts.) You can also buy a full-size bottle if you decide that AI has made The One.

What did I think of my AI perfumes?

Of the three scents the machine made, I’d put the first down as ‘nice but unmemorable’, but the others were closer to the mark, especially gourmand Number Two. “Oh, a bit Guerlain-y,” said one colleague. Or, as my daughter put it: “That smells exactly like one of your perfumes.” Curiously, the tweaked version I made, based on what I thought I’d like, was by far my least favourite. It just goes to show that a machine might actually know me better than I do myself, which is not creepy/unsettling at all.

I won’t claim that AI has found my new forever fragrance, but it’s a fun, fascinating experience and it would make a great personalised Christmas gift, too. Love may be blind, but its sense of smell seems to work pretty well.

More AI perfumes to buy

You don’t need to custom-blend to get an AI-powered perfume. These off-the-shelf scents are all tapping into the power of neuroscience plus AI analysis, enabling brands to identify notes that evoke a specific emotional response, then add them to the mix.

Notes of jasmine, freesia and exotic sands are more than just paradisical-sounding in Moschino Toy 2 Pearl. Here, they’ve been given a neuroscientific twist, having been monitored by AI technology for their ability to enhance wellness. The result is a scan-measured feeling of “joyfulness and energy” with each spritz, according to the brains behind the blend.

’Tis the season to be jolly, but if that Christmas spirit needs topping up, reach for Sanctuary Spa’s new Spiced Signature Collection: a neuroscience-backed fragrance blend that’s scientifically proven to boost festive cheer. Sanctuary has taken its iconic signature scent and wrapped it in cosy notes of cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and bitter orange to instantly put you in the holiday mood.

Givenchy’s Very Irresistible franchise has been a bestseller for decades, and it’s been brought bang up to date with a new neuroscience iteration, which includes an “anti-morose” rose extract selected on the basis of biometric research.

Paco Rabanne Phantom was developed using IFF’s “augmented creativity tool” plus 45 million (!) brain readings on men to see what emotions the EDP’s unusual pairings stimulated. If wearing the scent feels good, that’s no coincidence; the researchers scientifically proved that Phantom triggers responses of “alertness, energy and sexiness”.