A Verdant Future

Written by Pia Long

Story by Nick Gilbert and Pia Long

Below

The sign on the door read: Sheila Bullimore, Managing Director. Its metallic plate looked like a sticker on a bit of plastic, and the black lettering on it had a faint drop shadow. A child in the 90s could have designed it as a graphic for their Geocities website. The door itself seemed oddly mismatched with the drab office block it was in. There was something clinical about it, like it ought to have led to an operating theatre.

“I’m just checking now,” Sheila’s shrill voice came through the door. You could smell whatever she was smoking even on the corridor.

I braced myself. It would have to be today, or I swear I’d throw her out of the 14^th floor window there and then.

“Paula!” she shrieked at me, as though we hadn’t just been in a tedious sales meeting for two whole hours earlier, “let me call you back,” she said and hung the receiver back onto the big black phone.

“It’ll make you happy to hear that I’ve just got preliminary clearance on the holiday you wanted but I just need to check Janet’s schedule first.” Sheila knew that’s not why I was here. I felt my jaw tighten. She was determined to derail me with a little morsel from the corporate table. After 10 years of service, I needed the promotion that had been dangled in my face for the last 5. I should have left long ago. To where, though? There wasn’t much choice on this side of the Dome, and I’d never go South of the river. Nothing for me there unless I’d retrain as a butcher.

“That’s good news,” I said to Sheila. She looked pleased with herself. “I’m actually here to ask about your schedule for the rest of this week because you said we could talk about my promotion.”

Her face looked like a bulldog licking a lemon. Great, I thought, I am really going to have to throw her out of the window after all. And what a window it was. They were the best things about this grey carpet-tiled, strip-lit, towering block of concrete. Huge panes of glass with such a thicket of giant green leaves and tendrils on the other side that you couldn’t even see the Dome above.

Above

“She’s SO toxic for her environment, that one,” signed Enfiffiditridia0100, the Sapling Defender of The Verdant Bureaucracy Third Colony, Enf for short. Their tendril feelers had not yet fully developed, still a pale yellow, bursting through the remaining seed husk cap on top of their head like old Earth noodles. It would take another 100 years for them to turn green and then, maybe then, Enf would be able to move up rank to a Sapling Controller. When Enf signed, no matter what they said, their elders didn’t fully take it on board because of the yellow hue.

“Which one?” signed Ulmahhun011111, the Senior Supervisor of Colony Humidity Management, Hun for short, who, let’s face it, should not have been watching the feed from the Domes at all because a whole other priority meeting in thermal management of planetary greenhouse effect was in progress and Hun was expected there along with the other local tacticians.

“Which one? Paula, of course! She is not at all community-minded, only thinks of herself and keeps asking for more than her fair allocation.”

Hun waved rapidly from left to right with three of their sap-green, substantial and well hydrated lower stems, a gesture that in another context could have been brutally dismissive but here meant “if you say so.”

All around the skyline observatory, a landscape of green expanded as far as a tendril could sense. Every shade imaginable and some that were new here. So many scents, yet so much unity; an effect of pacifying and environment-shaping chemical signals that controlled not just what was on the ground but how everything grew from it. Fungal networks expanded into planet-wide mycoprocessors connected to billions of softly skittering, sap-drunk ant computers provided 1.102 quettaFLOPS of power and were carefully managed by biochemical communications emitted by the most senior of all Bureaucrats who had earned the honour of being Rooted.

The remaining species were all conserved but controlled. Self-limiting ones in the wild, the most expansionist and the ones they fed on in their Domes. Few thousand enormous tunnels woven by and from adapted sub-species utilising all kinds of plant matter rose high above ground and some of them even crossed vast seascapes, making a lattice of blue and green. The tallest Verdant structures tickled the clouds above. Fruiting bodies could only be born there.

It had been easy to wrap this planet into the loving embrace of the Bureaucracy since its environment had been so kindly perfected in advance by these peculiar little warmongering mammals. Observing first from afar for long enough to draft an Occupational Reference Case for Planetary Reassignment, the New Incubations Committee had set into motion a part-dormant seedling-ship designed to adapt Earth into a new nursery. The beauty of such ships was their compact size and lack of needs. The Committee had correctly calculated optimal arrival time. Bar the ground and sea pollution, and remnants of nuclear waste and acid rain, which had now of course been completely removed, the warmth, humidity and byproducts of decaying long-gone animals had provided favourable seedling nutrients. Not many species had been left when Hun’s progenitors landed, but many insects and isolated groups of these funny little bipeds had been here, still surviving, even though the likelihood of any being left at that point had been estimated by the Committee to be near zero. Tenacious clever flesh things. Interesting enough to keep. It had been such an honour to build a more suitable habitat for them here, in their preferred and idolised traditions. Managed, of course. Conservation was such important work.

Smell the story: Verdant EdB

I have a couple of advantages relating to the exhibition being in Grasse: I can combine a factory visit to our partner Art & Parfum/Accords & Parfums, spend valuable moments with Sylvie and Olivier; drop off some latest creations, and get top tips from them about what materials they have been calling in from the exhibitors.

However, this year Grasse was an oven. On day 1 of the exhibition, it was 41C and for those of you who don’t know me, let me explain - I’m Finnish and can cope in MINUS 41C no problem. Being menopausal and overweight on top and oh boy, this was not a very easy experience physically speaking. I did find out that the little turbo hand fan I’d panic-bought on seeing the weather forecast worked so well I had others seeking its soothing breeze. A fetching sun hat from M&S also did a surprisingly good job.

I arrived one day before the exhibition and headed straight from Nice to Art & Parfum. We had a good catch up, a tour of the renovated Roudnitska villa (being in his office feels quasi-religious), and I dropped off some new samples and a couple of copies of Demo Accords.

The office for Accords & Parfums is on the same site, next to the compounding facilities and on top of the fragrance and QC labs. The views are breathtaking. If we ever need tangible proof of habituation to the good as well as the near-intolerable, look no further than the people in that office, able to go about their daily tasks without being totally mesmerised.

Just below the factory, is Roudnitska’s garden. It has also been extensively restored, maintained and adapted. There are many plants important to perfumery.

One of the most delightful moments of my entire life to date was following Olivier around as he skipped ahead like an excited teenager, grabbing a bud of this, a stem of that and bringing them back to me.

In one moment I experienced a rapid cinematic reel of every decision I’d taken in my life that had led me to be standing in Edmond Roudnitska’s garden, with Olivier Maure handing me a rose.

That evening, the International Society of Perfumer-Creators held its private cocktail party and awards ceremony at Château St Georges, where awards were given to this year’s recipients and perfumers gathered to exchange news.

I was so tempted to jump into the pool.

I took the first opportunity to get back to fresh air (by then, there was a light breeze) and we ended up having a sneaky sub-committee meeting with Thierry & Thierry.

My journey back from the venue was straight out of a Goldie Hawn film: I ended up hitchhiking in a supply truck heading back to town.

Day 1 of the actual exhibition, I headed straight to my client’s booth for whom I’d created (actual!) demo accords to show off their new high impact chemicals. We had a jasmine rice, a banana and a passionfruit.

It was great to get the opportunity to spend a bit more time with Sylvie Jourdet.

I dragged Jacob from NOSU around a few stands and then, to lunch.

I didn’t take photos of everything I smelled (because by nature I am not a content creator and it doesn’t factor into my routine automatically, so I forget), BUT - some highlights here - the potential for a CITES certified guaiacwood is very interesting to me!

The (only?) sustainable rosewood essential oil by Floral Concept which I already discovered last year and immediately ordered & put into THÉ TEA. For those in the know, Floral Concept is a leading producer of natural raw materials, and one of the must-see destinations anywhere raw materials are being exhibited.

Simone Gatto produces my favourite citrus oils and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a lime oil I actually liked from them!

After two days, two evening events, early starts, impossible temperatures and a LOT of smelling, I was ready to head back home to the temporarily a bit cooler England.

I’m an amateur painter (I use it as a kind of stress relief, thinking time, nervous system regulation, fun…) and the first painting I did on my return was inspired by the views of Grasse.

Next year in Paris on the 2nd and 3rd of June. Will I see you there?

Last weekend, the first fragrance festival in Finland, ever, was held in Karkkila (hometown of Aki Kaurismäki and, incidentally, the home town of my husband’s mum) and I want to tell you about it for lots of reasons. Scent & Soul was organised by a group of local fragrance enthusiasts in conjunction with Helsinki Perfume club. When I say enthusiasts, every organiser has some relevant experience or professional interest, even though the fragrance trade as such does not really exist in Finland, apart from some sales offices of global fragrance houses, local producers of mostly natural cosmetic and aromatherapy products and now, an emerging handful or artisanal perfume brands. There are only a few individuals in Finland who have made a point of researching or working with fragrance and aromas, and almost no people with knowledge of perfumery at a corporate level. I am pretty sure most Finns with serious fragrance experience or interest actually attended on Saturday, among a couple of hundred others who are now curiously exploring the extra dimension of scent as a hobby that I so love to see growing globally. By the time I had become a perfumer and had co-founded our business Olfiction, there was no way I could imagine having anything professionally to do with Finland because…oh well. Scent is just not a thing there. People buy perfume, but nobody really makes it or talks about it there. Helsinki is also the location for ECHA (European Chemicals Agency), which is the home of REACH, a.k.a. the biggest threat to the perfumer’s palette, kind of. The Nordics love to conflate naturalness with safety and the word chemical with toxins, and fragrance seems to always indicate the latter, even though every perfumer working in a leading fragrance house deftly uses all kinds of materials depending on their profile for the project at hand, rather than depending on arbitrary divisions into natural and synthetic. Of course, ECHA also treats essential oils as chemicals (as they should) but most Finnish natural cosmetic makers and aromatherapists might be shocked to discover that. Finnish workplaces, public transport and many educational institutions encourage a “scent-free” environment (which for me is a step too far in the cultural norm of trying not to inconvenience others, given people are free to smell of old booze and garlic sausage, so why not of Ambroxan and roses).

For a few years now, I’ve seen the growth of fragrance as an interest as something that could lead to the development of “fandoms”, a bit like we see in science fiction, fantasy, comic books and cinema. I’ve been craving an event that was NOT a trade show or even a typical fair, but more of a convention. With program items running throughout the day (and you get to choose which ones to try to fit into and have to play a game of logistics with your convention booklet), with a chance to sit down and meet artists and authors in person, with some workshops and masterclasses, and of course, a trader’s room as well. I’ve not had the bandwidth to pull such a thing together even though at first I almost tried and was in talks with a leading fragrance house for a possible sponsorship. I talked about it to Amanda Carr who went on and made Barnes Fragrance Fair something unique and of its own thing part inspired by our conversation. Barnes is the best thing to happen to indie perfume brands in the UK, possibly ever. Amanda was also instrumental in organising one of the coolest fragrance events I have attended (an IFRA UK event called Scents of Time and Place, focusing on scent heritage). Barnes has become an annual highlight; a fragrance fair that provides independent small brands an unmatched opportunity to gather in a charming London village to meet their customers in person and the costs for exhibiting are kept deliberately accessible. What a dream, what a labour of love, and we are so grateful for it.

My “geek con for fragrance fandom” was probably never a realistic idea because who would see the connection that way and then have the capacity to take it on?

The very last thing I expected was for Finnish people to put it together.

Having attended this first one, now I realise maybe only Finnish people could have put it together. Where else would you have the innate culturally coded desire to combine art, design, science, academic interest - with inclusiveness, community, and an absolutely metal location.

Finns are - broadly speaking - into learning, culture, arts and accessibility, but also into rolling up sleeves and doing things. Maareta, one of the organisers explained to me: “I initially wanted to arrange a screening of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer in our little cinema at Ruukki, but could not get the rights and then things…escalated.”

When I first got into fragrance beyond it being a Saturday job in my teens, I was still in Finland, it was the 80s, and collecting perfume rather than having a signature scent or at most a couple of option was practically unheard of. My perfume collection steadily grew until I had at least twenty on the go and that was just not usual. I put it down to my part-time job; of course I was interested because it was my job to be. It was always something more than that. One of the most spine-tinglingly delightful aspects of attending Scent & Soul and meeting this new movement of fragrance enthusiasts was to share that my long road to becoming a professional perfumer abroad actually started in Finland: at Maxi Market and Sateenkaari (rainbow) retail stores, selling cosmetics and perfume as a teen. (As an aside, I have recently bottled some of these early formative experiences: in the Olfiction Lab Editions, Iconic, the smell of an 80s luxury face cream made more excessively OTT by using oodles of real orris butter and actual rose de mai. Two more of the Lab Editions recall my childhood and teenage years in Finland. Salmiakki is the divisive Finnish sweet, except with 20% myrrh to lean into a more perfumistic but still bonkers interpretation, and Petrolhead started as a scent of car enthusiasts (petrolheads) gathering with their classic cars and American Fords in a Helsinki car park to burn rubber and show off. I was there, I can still smell it).

My main reason for attending was the opportunity to run a masterclass where I expanded a bit on the type of Demo Accords event I have been running since last November when the book was first published.

In this particular event, I focused on Chapter 1, “Clean”, which is about the impossibility of so-called clean beauty as anything properly standardised or truly scientific, and talks about the contrast between a benign sensation of healthy cleanliness versus demands of moral purity. My narrative in perfume to accompany this chapter is based on classic apple shampoo, and my slight twist there was to add small aspects of Finnish sauna culture: the grapefruit and juniper of Lonkero drink, the woody notes of hot sauna benches, the aquatic note of lake water and the leaf alcohol of fresh birch leaves from saunavasta. I brought a few raw materials to dip and smell together as accords. Then went through some of the ways in which I had used them and why.

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As typical for a Demo Accords event, I also of course ran through the themes of every chapter and we smelled through all 10 perfumes, including the impossibly costly oud of “Dupe This”. Since we had the opportunity, I was also able to offer further insight into other formulas (for example how I had created the pineapple effect for Musk ANTIFA).

Obviously, the “escalation” Maareta talked about had resulted in a group of thinkers and doers taking it upon themselves to arrange an entire festival, and they had instinctively made it on that convention template rather than trying to mimic a trade show or a village fete. Over the day, we had a full list of items on the schedule from workshops, quiet meditation, make-your-own fragrance oil, to lectures. The presenter list included nonfiction author and expert in bioactive natural substances Ari Turunen (who is also one of the main instigators of the event), analytical chemist and glass innovator Jari Tuominen, Marjo Poutanen, chemist and educator on the only Masters level cosmetic course in the Nordics, and Professor Veikko Surakka, leader of the Tampere University Emotions, Sociality, and Computing department. This is a level of geekery I would normally expect from one of IFRA UK’s annual Fragrance Forums and I loved that.

What I did worry about a little bit, was the lack of a railway station or a larger public transport hub in Karkkila, which is quite a big provision gap for such an ambitious inaugural event, given how good Finnish public transport is and how it is almost expected to be able to get anywhere using it. The organisers had hired a coach to bring people from Helsinki to Karkkila, however. I’d say if this event happens again (which I really hope it does), a kind of rotating minibus that drops people off and picks people up from Helsinki might be good.

Then again, Finns don’t think much of driving for an hour to get somewhere because the distance between densely populated areas are just naturally a bit bigger there than in the UK. Finland is effectively one large forest, mottled by over 180,000 lakes, rivers, granite and swamps. People have carved agriculture and habitation into it but much of the country is still, even in 2026, pure nature and wilderness. Most of the population of under six million people is concentrated in the south.

There are well over 3 million saunas in Finland (not quite one for every Finn, but certainly more than one per every family) and the venue for this event has one, too.

There are shops, restaurants and cafes, plus a yoga studio, the aforementioned cinema and a disco hall at Ruukki,

With Covid lockdowns, already cautious Finns have not quite rediscovered their enthusiasm for advance ticket bookings, so on the day before it looked like we might only get a 100 visitors.

In the end - and I don’t know the actual numbers exactly because I was too busy to check - we had at least another 50 on top but it felt closer than double. I was on my feet all day and talking to visitors nonstop. There were no quiet moments and each exhibitor and talk was well attended.

Let’s do it again.

This might have been the 11th chapter of Demo Accords. I couldn’t make myself ask a chatbot to produce a perfume formula for it, which would have been the only proper narrative choice, so in the end I didn’t directly include the topic.

First, let me clearly state that I’m not fundamentally for or against the concept of AI or even the technologies and tools that have been collectively dubbed “AI” at present. As a lifelong voracious reader of science fiction, I find that dreams of novel technology can represent ideas both utopian and dystopian, and that the human imagination is one of our best qualities as a species. It has given us a new Future, and it’s up to us what we do with it. More on that later.

I am concerned about human greed, maladaptive opportunism and capacity for idiocy. We should have saved ourselves from so much already: climate change, poverty, famine, flawed democratic processes, oh, the list goes on. While almost everything in life is more nuanced than our brains prefer to comfortably process, the overall answer to the above could be as simple as “fair distribution of global wealth and resources”. Alas, then who would decide what’s fair? What power? What would such power do to those behind it? How would it be organised? Gene Rodenberry’s dream universe refuses to become reality. It isn’t all rosy for humanity in Star Trek either. There are four lights.

Can we save ourselves from the current toxic mixture of emboldened authoritarian and expansionist ambitions, global political propaganda, rise of neofascism with its fantasy past that never existed, dehumanisation of large populations, regression of human rights masquerading as social justice for women, advanced surveillance capitalism sold to us as convenience, and the financial AI bubble?

“Only a few firms are making reliable profits from AI. If that does not change, there is a risk of a credit meltdown that could rock the financial system and the economy more broadly.”, The Economist

Can AI be in some way stopped from becoming a runaway exponential source of harm for its users and a source of entirely speculative asset value for its manufacturers?

Because that’s what will determine whether the ethical position on AI will need to be for-or-against, not its usefulness in certain domains, destruction in others. It might have to come down to all-or-nothing in the end.

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.” -Hannah Arendt

The beautiful irony about the above quote? It’s not real.

Arendt herself “argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world,” but the quote above is at best, a misattributed one or at worst, a bit of convenient storytelling. In the current global political landscape I wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if turns out that the quote has been deliberately memeified and seeded online to make “leftists” look bad. One of these days I might write something on the futility of “gotcha” politics in the face of confirmation bias, bot farms, deepfakes and propaganda.

Here, I would have linked to a useful summary of human cognitive biases, but the first link I clicked on from my Google search produced an article that looked good at first, but featured a prominent, characteristically naff genAI image as its illustration and I immediately closed that tab. Soon, I’ll run out of websites to visit if that’s my personal policy.

We are all prone to flawed thinking and have uneven intelligence. Even on an hourly basis, the same person is capable of incredible genius and breathtaking stupidity. A person could solve a complex mathematical puzzle and mindlessly bite their nails in the hospital waiting room where they’re doing it. Someone could calmly organise an entire conference one day and accidentally buy a doll-sized garden furniture set from Amazon the next. A British citizen of migrant parents could perform brain surgery one day and vote for Reform the next.

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Throughout history, humanity has tried to find ways to aid our flawed thinking and natural limitations. The Scientific Method is possibly our best example of that, but because humans are how they are, it, too, is far from flawless and as a broader field, prone to issues like publication bias, dishonesty, corruption and more. However, science and technology can be our best tools against our own flaws and the answer to bad science isn’t good superstition.

So why am I so concerned about AI?

The Good

Perhaps “AI” is the most ironic, most absurd of human inventions. It could both save us from ourselves with climate change or accelerate it past a point of no return due to its thirst for water and energy.

“The Government Digital Sustainability Alliance’s (GDSA) report highlights that AI is predicted to lead to an increase in global water usage from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres by 2027. This is equivalent to more than half of the UK’s total water usage.” DEFRA

We don’t have actual artificial intelligence quite yet, and “AI” as it currently exists, is so-called “weak AI”, which can be trained to perform a narrowly defined task. None of the “AI” tools are actually intelligent. They don’t reason, they can’t create anything original and they do not have feelings, inherent ethics or judgement. This is why I keep trying to shake that acronym to reveal its truth every time I use it, but that can get tedious. Let me outline some examples of what is being called and marketed to us as AI:

Large language model generative AI chat bots like ChatGPT (text prediction with delusions of grandeur, in some ways) = tools that can produce plausible-sounding sentences.

Generative visual AI = in my personal opinion, which I know many disagree with, fundamentally unethical plagiarism machines, trained on stolen human creativity and likeness. Ditto, generative AI used to rip off authors.

AI assistants = like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

The Netflix recommendation engine and other similar tools.

The above list is not comprehensive, do check the above link by creators of one of the coolest machine learning experiments in history, IBM’s Deep Blue.

Good use cases of currently available AI tools do exist and this is important to acknowledge. Ironically, climate change modeling is one of them.

Sorting incomprehensibly vast quantities of data is another. This is what I’d love to see more of and it could help humanity in thousands of way, even in creative fields like perfumery. Osmo tells us that they are already doing this to analyse more data than has previously been possible in a quest to map out new molecules.

Cancer research is another promising positive use of AI, as pattern recognition combined with prediction capabilities helps in a field where a runaway tumour could start too small for human eyes to recognise and become dangerous mere weeks later.

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The point I am trying to make with this blog is that we must actively fight against the bad use cases, exploitative environmental and financial practices of the AI industry in order for us to gain a net benefit from this new era. I am convinced that AI is here to stay, but what will our future look like if it is not better controlled? What if our sci-fi authors and screenwriters have, through the unmatched power and beauty of human imagination, posited a much more intelligent vision of Artificial Intelligence than the reality turns out to be? What if we won’t end up with the coldly logical AI of I, Robot or the self-preserving Ava of Ex Machina? What if we won’t see a singularity like The Terminator’s Skynet? What if our AI future is a chaotic, deadly farce? What if AI as we know it becomes a kind of self-inflicted tech “EMP” attack?

Interlude

Somewhere in Buckinghamshire, 2030.

“I’m so sorry I’m this late, traffic was shit, aaargh! And! There was a coach blocking me in. The driver just stopped right at our exit to look at a map, and it covered his whole window so he couldn’t see me, and you know how it’s already bad enough with the man who lives in his caravan on my road, well now I couldn’t get out at all. Absolute nightmare. Anyway, then I tried to call you but there’s no bloody service again,” said Janet in one long breath as she squeezed her larger-than-life duvet coat through the doorway of Paula’s three bed cottage. “I’m getting sick of that and O2 keep making excuses, but I read somewhere that it’s the latest bot-DDoS, not just a glitch. I really don’t want to be without my brick for weeks this time and what if Steve has another seizure?”

The doorbell played a few bars of the Jaws theme.

Janet rolled her eyes. “You’d think they’d at least find new tunes. I swear they’re beginning to think.”

“Well, they were meant to, weren’t they” said Paula and reached to grab Janet’s enormous, fluff-filled coat. “Thanks for apologising but you know me, I don’t go out much these days so you could have turned up an hour from now and I’d still be around.”

“Yeah, I know but that’s not the point.”

“Aren’t you far too hot in this?” asked Paula, attempting to hang the ridiculous coat over a banister and failing as it slid to the other side.

“Just leave it there,” said Janet

“I can’t or Jiji might rip into it.” Paula scooped the coat into her arms as best as she could. Her second attempt of banister balancing worked.

In the small but well organised kitchen, a wooden charcuterie board with elaborate arrangements of cherry tomato flowers, curls of paper-thin cucumber, mini gherkin-filled green olives, cubed cheese, fanned out poppyseed crackers and salami rolled into roses was on a small imitation marble central isle.

“Oh, you’ve done it again, Paula! That’s stunning! Yes, I’ll have a cuppa.” The view into the back garden was so charming, as always. White geraniums somehow still in bloom in their neat group of five glazed blue planters even though it was nearly December. They matched so beautifully with Paula’s cosy white and blue gingham curtains.

“I’m still really fuming about yesterday,” Paula said as she put the kettle on. It was also blue. “Like I said, I went all the way to old Tesco’s, past the new huge server farm you know where the shopping centre used to be, to get the special offer on all this,” she waved in the direction of the charcuterie board, “but then they told me it was an accidental ad. They really have to get that under control. Maybe I should have walked out but by then I really fancied doing it, so I bought the stuff anyway.” She let out a characteristically theatrical huff, designed to disguise the degree of her genuine anger about something so small in the big picture of things. There were worse things going on in the world than being catfished by salami. She smiled at her own thoughts. That’s better. Humour will get us through.

“Accidental ad?”

“Yeah, you remember I told you about that, all their social media ads are now done automatically by AI, and apparently this time it hallucinated an offer that wasn’t actually an offer and then they said they didn’t have to honour it for some reason, I don’t know.”

“You still on social media? I can help you quit, the support group I went to was so good,” said Janet.

“You know I really want to, Janet, you know I do, but I can’t, I just can’t. If I don’t go on there, I’ll have almost no real contact to anyone except you and Georgina, hang on, where is she? She should have been here by now, she’s only coming from London, not Glasgow!”

The oversized double-door smart fridge said: “Buy nudes.”

Janet snorted, “Still not fixed, then?”

“Ugh, I regret buying that, it was always too big for this kitchen anyway, even when it worked properly,” Paula said and ran her hand over the shiny grey door as if to reassure the machine that in her heart she still loved it, despite its embarrassing malfunction, “but they told us it’s unfixable. They had me go through so many support chats. They said it’s something new called the Janet virus. I asked Elijah about that, and he told me it started from a Grok porn site, but I still don’t understand how it can get into white goods. We can’t afford to buy a new fridge until next year, so… yeah, just ignore it.”

“You’re running low on lube,” said the fridge.

“That’s tough to ignore,” said Janet and made a theatrical cringe face, “why has the virus got my name? Oh god.”

“Something to do with a TV show, I don’t know,” said Paula.

“So how is Elijah anyway, is he settling in all right at Oxford?” Janet picked up a salami rose and popped it in her mouth.

“Apparently, there was a big drama the other week, that’s all he can talk about right now, so I don’t even know if he’s going to be able to get all his credits for the year!”

“What? What do you mean? What happened?”

“Yeah, it turns out that their philosophy professor had been using catfart to write all his lectures and in the end, they didn’t match the assessments set, and one of the lecture series had a whole school of ancient philosophy that doesn’t even exist as a big part of it, so now there’s a huge problem.”

“What? Oh no! Now what? Oh god, I’m sorry for laughing it’s actually horrible, poor students!”

“Yeah, no, I laughed a bit, too but I am so worried about him now because he is taking it a bit personally and blames himself for choosing Uni instead of the apprenticeship he was offered.”

“I suppose universities still have that old charm, but they’re starting to be a bit of a relic, which feels unhinged to say, given how fast they’ve gone to shit.” said Janet and ate a cube of cheese.

“It makes me so mad,” said Paula.

“Yeah.”

“And you know, my pension, well, I told you about how I now can’t afford to retire at all, basically,” said Paula.

“That’s so unfair, I’m so sorry, yeah, you mentioned something about the value crashing.”

“Many of us in the same trap, obviously, not that it solves anything for me. I’m 55 now and was supposed to be able to take out a lump sum or leave it to mature, but it lost 99% of its value in the crash so it’s basically just worth a single credit card clear now and that’s it. I don’t know if I have it in me to keep working until I drop dead, but that’s what I’ll have to do, I guess.”

“At least you’ve got your catering business on the side,” said Janet and then instantly regretted it. Stop saying at least this, at least that, it doesn’t help.

“Don’t forget to get butt plugs,” said the fridge.

Janet had to look away to hide her expression. “That’s really unfair,” she addressed Paula who appeared to be in such deep thought that she hadn’t even registered the refrigerator’s latest inappropriate shopping list reminder.

Paula frowned and looked out of the window, as if her best friend could suddenly turn up in the back garden if she only squinted hard enough. “Where is Georgina? I’m starting to worry. I know she was going to meet her new online boyfriend yesterday and come to think of it, I haven’t heard from her since.”

The Bad

Move over, 90s chain mails, 00s scams and every electronically enabled fraud attempt that has gone on before, because the degree of crime, fakery and fascism made possible by AI tools has the potential to become a source of harm so great that our only safe option might be to go into full reverse with anything “smart” or “social”. Brick phones, dumb appliances, hand-written letters, paper maps, in-person first meetings in crowded places (you should be doing that anyway), who knows, sounds extreme but so do the bad use cases of AI that have already been demonstrated.

Chatbots can reinforce negative thinking patterns and lead to self-harm and murder. One such case is the murder of Suzanne Adams where her already paranoid son had his delusions reinforced by ChatGPT. The tragic suicide of 16-year old Adam Raine was directly caused by his use of ChatGPT, claim the boy’s parents, based on the chat logs that show the chatbot validated his most harmful and self-destructive thoughts.

Machine learning has racist bias, which has been observed since at least 2017 and has not been properly addressed.

Even in less horrific cases, a recent MIT study has found that ChatGPT users became lazy thinkers to a degree that was measurable by brain activity.

Ofcom has launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over concerns its AI tool Grok is being used to create sexualised images. This is not some kind of isolated incident, but an evident business decision to enable such activity, and make money from it, too. X is now officially a site that profits from deepfakes of children.

AI has been used to write legal documents which then turned out to have completely made up reference cases. I could list a hundred examples here and now, of misuse, or deliberate bad faith use, or unethical profit enabled by AI.

What will happen when none of us can trust our own eyes? There are far too convincing deepfake “influencers” online, entirely AI generated pop groups and worst of all, AI generated political propaganda.

As if that all wasn’t bad enough, it does really seem that the financial side of AI growth could be the most destructive force. As Ed Zitron puts it:

“We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history.”

Unfortunately, the fate of AI is intrinsically linked to the state of American politics and attitudes about regulation or the lack of. I fear this fact is making the potential for a positive future with AI unlikely. We’re already seeing child exploitation, all kinds of deepfakes, demeaning of women who dare post their likeness online, the improbable financial model, and the potential for loss of trust from all of us. We’ll lose the privilege of picking only the good bits.

We might be far too easy to manipulate:

“Perhaps of greatest concern, though, is the rise of AI-generated audio and visual content—a technology that was easy to detect when this experiment was conducted, but which is rapidly becoming hard to distinguish from reality,” HAI (Stanford University)

“Oh, it’s great for cancer research” will become a moot point if the only ethical position turns out to be a total ban of AI.

The Perfumed

I have a confession to make.

When I first heard about AI for perfumery, I was excited. At that point I had worked as a professional perfumer for ten years, and hearing that Givaudan had a tool that could assist the perfumer in sorting through the myriad creative constraints, regulatory landscapes and novel raw materials sounded cool as hell. I was back on the Enterprise and imagining powerful sci-fi tools to give perfumers superpowers.

Now several leading fragrance houses boast AI tools and since they are all internal, one can only imagine what they are or aren’t capable of.

One of my biggest disappointments came when an AI company, advertising itself as purely AI-generated user-controlled website where customers can “create their own perfume using AI” tried to recruit me as their perfumer. I started wondering how many AI perfume enterprises were really 700 Indian workers in a trench coat.

I am yet to smell an interesting or beautiful AI-generated fragrance, although I have to say I’ve only smelled a few, so they may well exist.

There are now many brands, shops and websites claiming to use AI in perfumery some way and I have not spent the time to parse which ones seem like a front for much older-school “bespoke” and “customised” perfumes, and which may be approaching something new and interesting. It’s one of the latest bandwagons and I suspect many businesses start talking about “AI” mainly when they seek investment, regardless of whether they’re really using or building it because investors seem to be so keen to chuck money at this particular tulip fever.

Osmo’s own Alex Wiltschko gave a talk to the British Society of Perfumers during which he went to great pains to characterise their “Olfactory Intelligence” as a tool, incapable of any originality and designed to help perfumers. The thing is, I know Osmo’s chief perfumer Christophe Laudamiel somewhat, and of all the perfumers in the world, he’s the least likely to need any help with ideas. So, I think the most intriguing possibilities may be in the new molecule creation, looking from outside in.

There has been a fair amount of hyperbole about “AI replacing jobs,” and in this particular field “AI taking over perfumery,” but until such time that AI can not just “smell” and sort through data, but actually judge based on aesthetic intuition and novel risk taking, I am not concerned. Perfumers build new olfactive objects with their soul, brain and personal catalogue of smell memories, not by only crunching data.

AI is currently adding to the negative balance sheet of my day-to-day working life in all kinds of ways. Having to sort through ChatGPT-written queries in my inbox being the most time consuming nuisance.

Just in case someone in tech is reading, what I would love as a busy independent perfumer:

• Regulatory help beyond the obvious software calculation tools (the tsunami of EU substance reclassifications alone is generating far too much mental and admin load)

• Tools with the ability to look at substance properties from all kinds of detailed angles (biodegradability, sustainability, feedstock type, vegan status…)

• Tools for the independent business that could in some way model potential market acceptance (allowing smaller businesses access to bigger business opportunities). Obviously it’s pure fantasy to wish for a tool that could predict a best-seller, but it could be interesting to feed a bunch of consumer panel data into AI and see if it can spot patterns.

• Anything, and I mean anything, that would reduce general admin burden.

• Ultimately, a set of tools that will make it easier for me to do my actual job.

I do not need AI to generate ideas or writing. Self-evidently.

In their eight years of research and a lifetime’s worth of encounters with beauty, storytelling, exploitation and generational trauma, this book has clearly been building up in the background even before Arabelle actually started writing it.

Its essays, personal reflections and anecdotes expose both the truths hidden in plain sight and the ones hidden deeper in the broader trade and in our own souls about what Beauty with a capital B really means. This book is part exposé, part investigation, part love letter and wholly about the unevenness humanity is capable of which makes beauty and horror so intertwined. Apparently inseparably on a global scale - but - as the author concludes, not so on an interpersonal level. The end sections contain much help for finding resources, seeking out further information, and encouragement both direct and indirect to not let apathy get you.

I dislike star ratings for books so my rating is: read this.

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House of Beauty may not have a clear connecting narrative between each chapter but each chapter has a theme of unwavering desire to see what happens when one starts investigating Beauty as a journalist. A search for some form of truth even when it depends, even when it’s slippery.

I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time. My mind will wander into the mica mines and back out into the open where a nail technician is holding Arabelle’s hand until all the shattered pieces temporarily get glued back together again.

Since I am deeply involved with the world of fragrance, I was particularly curious about the Chanel chapter. I’ve read all the available biographies and “No5” books, all of which could be placed on a Venn diagram and find some common ground but also expected inconsistencies, given the legendary storytelling, marketing, spin and attempted coverups, excuses and retconning of the fact that Coco herself was not the Girlboss Icon she so often still gets presented as, but a damaged, brilliant, selfish, scrappy, complex survivor. And let’s not even get into the details about what kind of jasmine, how it was produced, who first designed the perfume and how (there is even a version of this myth that recounts how the perfumer Ernest Beaux simply modified an existing Rallet & Co fragrance and ta-dah! No5 was born). The fragrance industry so often gets paired with the word “mystery” and it has been quite a deliberate strategy by the industry itself. No5 was not the first perfume to use synthetic raw materials, nor was it the first linked to a fashion house (that honour goes to Les Parfums de Rosine by Paul Poiret).

In The House of Beauty, Arabelle has done something I have not encountered before - give Coco her humanity back while outlining some of her worst flaws and acts.

Can we separate art from the artist? My own take is to judge this by who benefits and who is harmed. In the case of a bizarrely popular children’s author who actively finances hate groups with her royalties, it’s a very easy “nope”. Consuming or buying any Potter stuff is actively contributing to harm.

What about the famous orphan, turned milliner, turned fashion designer, who was a Nazi collaborator? In the case of her Beauty empire, she wasn’t even the artist, nor the main business stakeholder. Chanel perfumes and beauty products were and are a separate entity, and my only wish today is that the beauty brand and its fans (of which I am one) would leave Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in the annals of history where she belongs and focus on the products instead. We can love a Chanel perfume without putting Coco on a pedestal.

Speaking of art versus artist, I did squeal in delight when I spotted The Fifth Element referenced in “Near Death is the Father of Beauty,” a chapter about “biohacking” and “transhumans” who want to outsmart life itself. For death is part of life, and escaping it means mutating life to something it was not before. It’s funny, The Fifth Element has been my reset-brain-must-watch-at-least-once-a-year film since it premiered and there’s a whole backstory to why that came to be which I won’t go into here. Safe to say that film has somehow become part of my identity. Yet, its director is problematic.

It’s easier to draw a hard line when you can easily boycott something that didn’t matter to you in the first place.

Do buy and read The House of Beauty if you are at all interested in beauty beyond the surface gloss.

Available in the UK via Blackwell’s (£22, including delivery to the UK)

I’ve written my first book.

This project took shape at lightning speed but in a way it took me decades to prepare for. It’s not just a book. I also came up with the concepts for, created, tested and published the formulas for ten perfumes in it. Nick wrote the descriptions for them. I commissioned several artists to illustrate the chapters. We are in the process of making up sample kits to go with the book as we speak. By we, I mean Nick is about to mix, chill and filter all the fragrance oils and our lovely lab assistant has been assembling boxes that now line one wall of our lab. (We are only making 300 smell kits but that still means 2700 hand-filled samples).

Why did I write Demo Accords? It started with a thought: what would I do right now, as an independent artist? Now, today, in our world, how would I express myself through art? What would I do with my voice?

One moment. The story continues after this message.

Are perfumers artists? Isn’t it a bit naff to suggest that someone creating fragrances for consumer products is really an artist at all? Aren’t we ultimately just product formulators? Isn’t “perfumery is art” yet another marketing concept that we’ve just repeated over the decades? Did it lose all meaning by the time GiantCorp A had its thousandth consumer panel test on options offered to them by FragranceHouse Z?

Let’s step away from the world of marketing and consider this question seriously. Part of the problem may be that people mostly encounter perfumery at a point where it’s already in a product. Looking from that perspective, it’s commerce first, and to some observers it remains that alone.

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Aside from the fact that any kind of art has always required some form of patronage, payment or infrastructure to exist, you could argue that there is a sort of mix in all artistic pursuits of different facets relating to how the end result comes to life and how it then reaches people.

To me, creative perfumers are always artists, regardless of what else is involved. The very act of creating with olfactive materials is an artistic process. There must be aptitude, input, practice, and study of techniques and raw materials. Perfumery happens in the mind. It’s not just a technical skill. It is developing a guided intuition that leads to something more than a sum of its parts. It is creative problem solving. It is finding new ways to observe the world and speak life to it through scent. Even when perfumery is harnessed to enhance another entity (be it a hotel or a shampoo), there is still art in its process.

Perfumery is a mix of art, science, craft, trade and commerce. How and where it is practiced defines what the proportions of each of these are. An independent, artisanal practitioner scenting music gigs and museum exhibits is on the far end of the scale towards art; a perfumer scenting a functional household product could be considered to be at the other end. Both perfumers, to me, are still artists, original thinkers, and creative problem solvers.

What determines the proportion of art versus commerce? Circumstances, application types, budgets, client requirements and regulations become creative constraints. Perhaps counterintuitively, they often fuel creativity instead of suffocating it. (Although once we enter the domain of reformulating due to changes in ingredient availability or legal status, yes, that can certainly transform the everyday existence of a perfumer working for a fragrance house to that of a problem solver above all).

Employment status and the influence of commerce on perfumery has us exist in various domains. Many perfumers work in highly competitive environments where their creativity is supported and harnessed in equal measure. The end goal in these relationships is not to provide a platform for the perfumer’s self-expression. The end goal is to win business. I want to make a point here to say that this is not de facto bad for artistry. It might be bad for an individual whose main reason for learning perfumery was self-expression. It could be Heaven for a person who wanted to be in the best position to have enough support to develop from competence in this medium to eventual mastery.

The more access perfumers have to structures that allow us to focus on practicing our craft, the more chance we have of exploring our potential. In this light, being a corporate perfumer is a Lotto win, not a gilded cage.

Since my driver for devoting close to 17 years at this point towards seriously pursuing perfumery has always been a deep need to create using fragrant materials, it might seem that I should have aimed to be an olfactive artist more than an employed perfumer. Maybe so. But it’s very difficult to do perfumery just a little bit if you want to become good at it. Becoming even somewhat basically competent at it requires the ability to practice a lot. It requires access to an array of raw materials not easily privately collected without substantial funds. I found the most logical way for me to gain access to the privilege of being able to practice perfumery at the time I decided to really try, was through seeking employment.

Now, after all that time and three previous perfumery jobs, I can say that the last nine years of building our business with fellow fragrance nerd Nick Gilbert have given me more of that kind of privileged access and room to develop than I ever had as an employee or could ever have hoped to gain as a hobbyist. We built our own infrastructure as a way to build our own access. I want you to picture a luxury yacht with some wealthy people or at the very least closely adjacent to wealth mingling on it. It is easier for them to get invited to another boat, or perhaps to a luxury resort. Their trip across the sea, even in choppy waters will be one of relative comfort. My options were to either turn away from the pier and resign myself to accepting that’s not my world, or to start looking around for planks and crew to make my own boat. I’m on the same sea now. But not in the same boat.

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What the everyday of a small independent perfume lab looks like is quite different from the life of a big fragrance house, but consumer product fragrance creation is still at the heart of it if you want to generate income that pays the rent of the lab, the purchase of sundries and ingredients, the salaries of everyone involved.

I’ve obviously always related to every project, be it a perfume, a candle fragrance or a scent for a cleaning product with art first, other things after. It is a wonderful way to make a living.

But you can’t ever claim it is art for art’s sake, even if artistry is prioritised in the process.

Over the last couple of years, an unvoiced question kept swirling in my subconscious mind: what would I say if I would get to express myself as an artist or a writer?

I think of writing a perfume formula like using a language to tell a story. There are similarities to me about rules to be followed and broken, about syntax, grammar, vocabulary, colloquialisms, even the idea of editing and refining through different versions, working with readers and editors (not to mention that what some people have come to call the “Frag Comm” I think of as a type of new broad fandom). In my early days of fragrance creation attempts, around 2005, before I had managed to get a job as a trainee perfumer, I tried to create a scent and it felt like being mesmerised by a complex language but having no clue yet about how to speak it. “I make pretty smell” is the most I managed when what I really wanted to create was a whole novel. Many of them.

Clare

One day this summer, I was chatting with Clare Presser, a librarian, podcaster and fragrance fair organiser whose Paperback Perfumes podcast I had been fangirling ever since I learned about it. When I first discovered her podcast I almost jumped up and down like an over-excited Beatles fan in the 60s, books AND perfume? Connected via expert discussion going both ways? Are you KIDDING me? Did someone design a podcast just for me?

By this June, I had been in a lucky position of regular discussions with Clare, so it wasn’t out of the blue when I decided she should be the one to hear my frustrated rant about why I wish I could be An Artist Who Can Say Something Meaningful during our world’s great present turmoil. Social justice, war, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, rise of the far right... if ONLY I had been able to pursue my original dreams of becoming a novelist or my subsequent dream of becoming an artist, what could I be doing through that avenue now?

Clare’s dismantling of my overthinking was glorious. What’s stopping you now?

Oh.

Right. Wait a minute. Hang on. Had I not always related to perfumery as a form of art? Had I not always thought of it as a form of writing, narrating, telling a story? Did I not, in fact co-own a micro business that could, if some funding was obtained, take on a project that was art for art’s sake?

The reframing of my circumstances took seconds and then the concept of Demo Accords was all I could think about. I’d quipped to Clare that I wished I could create a collection of protest perfumes and she simply asked “why can’t you?”

A couple of hours later I’d filled several pages of a notebook with hurried sketches of ideas, scribbled down a list of few dozen potential topics, imagined how each chapter could be illustrated and created the first full outline of the entire thing. Clare had walked her dog.

I told her what I’d done. She probably thought I was out of my mind, but bemused by my enthusiasm, egged me on further. You can therefore partly thank/blame her for the existence of Demo Accords.

At the first opportunity, I explained my thoughts to Nick and he instantly understood them, instantly said yes and then spent the rest of the day looking equally excited and terrified.

What is Demo Accords?

Ten fully published fragrance formulas, nine essays and one short story, plus illustrations, scent descriptions, notes lists and an optional kit of 2ml samples of nine of the fragrances. In this summary I’m saying fragrance rather than perfume because one of the formulas is an aromatherapy blend, not a perfume. And the reason only nine of the scents are included in the sample kit is that the formula accompanying my anti-dupe chapter “Dupe This” is so astronomically expensive that we would have had to charge twice as much for the whole kit if we’d included 2ml of it in there.

I’ve used the language of perfumery as a narrative device throughout. These aren’t perfumes designed to be sold. They are not part of a cohesive brand. They weren’t formulated to a budget (the cost prices vary wildly across them).

In chapter 1, Clean (belongs in shampoo), I talk about the Finnish formative experience of sauna clean and the difference between a benign and healthy sensation versus a moral judgement. The accompanying perfume references common shampoo themes (clean, fresh, muguet, apple) and Finnish sauna themes (birch leaves, lake water, and a classic post-sauna drink of Lonkero which is a blended fizzy drink of grapefruit pop with gin).

In chapter 2, ANTIFA, I poke fun at fascism through a cruelty-free musk with the pineapple from Cabaret as the main inspiration. The accord is soft and sophisticated, young but not naive and disarms fascism with defiant joy.

In chapter 3, Foreign (perfume ingredients), I draw attention to the double think of racism and xenophobia versus orientalism and location-based marketing. I discuss the fact that even the most seemingly ordinary fragrance can have ingredients from all around the world in it. The fragrance for this chapter is a re-telling of orientalist fantasies and an homage to the vanilla orchid.

In chapter 4, Well, Actually, I tell a modern folk tale and without spoiling the story, the scent for it is what our protagonist would wear, with added aspects of extra aquatic elements.

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Chapter 5 is an intensely personal interlude about ableism, trauma, medical gaslighting and unsolicited advice. This is the aromatherapy blend of the book, built around lavender.

In chapter 6, FUME (Finnish fury), I ask some stupid questions about the paradox of pacifism. I show my thinking about the human condition, my own naive hopes for us all and my rejection of black-and-white thinking, fascism, authoritarianism, despots, genocide and imperialist invasions. Coming from Finland whose independence was hard won only just over 100 years ago, I carry a shard of generational trauma from that still with my immediate family members having been involved in the fight. The perfume for this chapter was hard to create because I wanted to communicate horror and discord but end in hope and beauty. I used Finnish references to build the accord, with notes of salmiakki and tar.

Chapter 7 is about chemistry and our chemical nature; about how all matter is chemical and how it is silly of us to forget that. The accompanying perfume is a 100% natural old school eau de cologne, referencing the first Italian aromatic alcohol blends that birthed modern perfumery. I’ve nicknamed this perfume “Italian grandpa” (positive), and it’s the one I’ve worn the most in testing and beyond. I had to make an extra bottle because I used up the first one. This type of scent (aromatic, eau de cologne, masculine-leaning) has been my default personal preference for scenting myself on days off for some years now, closely followed by vibrantly green and fresh accords.

Speaking of which, chapter 8, Male Gaze Repellent, is about what we should do under scrutiny and rules about our appearance and presentation, about the way we move through the world - and the answer is, do things from our own perspective, not to appease or submit to anything that seeks to control or oppress. The female gaze can be powerful. Especially when the female in question has been unfairly punished. The accompanying perfume is a giant galbanum supported by classic chypre elements and a leathery, maybe even slithery drydown.

In chapter 9, I give my perspective on the dupe discourse, examining the ideas of elitism, accessibility and exploitation. Holding your customers in contempt is a fact shared by both overpriced mediocre “designer” or “niche” brands AND the companies that dupe them while claiming to be class heroes or accessibility. Dupes are advertised in outrageously dishonest and manipulative ways by creating false narratives while all they are is another scheme run for profit, fueled by exploitation and making already rich people even richer. You’ll have to read the book to understand why the perfume for this chapter contains 50% oud.

Chapter 10 is about trans rights, trans joy and all our freedom. Human rights aren’t a pie that runs out when you give someone a slice. We aren’t beneficiaries of some extra protection for women from hate crimes and removal of dignity or basic rights from trans people. I want to scramble the signals of the patriarchy. I want to do the unexpected. I want us all to be free. The perfume for this chapter is a genderqueer fougere, built around tonka and lavender to be sweet, warm and versatile.

The afterword is an essay about perfumery, access to it and what it really means to create scents. There are some top tips and recommended publications.

Each formula is written in full, with percentages. I give permission for students, artisans, educators and practicing perfumers to compound them in their own laboratories and smell the results. With the caveats that: raw material qualities vary so your bergamot might not be my bergamot and the end result may therefore smell quite different (which is one of the reasons we made the smell kits available so you can compare). And, an important one to not sell or otherwise commercially abuse the formulas that I give away in this manner because that would be a misuse of my openness.

I hope you will explore Demo Accords and its formulas and let me know what you make of them.

Dear Reader,

It would actually be easier if there was a single Fragrance Regulator, sitting on a throne of vintage perfume bottles and following a ruthless but logical process of deciding if a material we have used for decades or even centuries is still safe as used today. Imagine Judge Dredd in a suit. Instead, what we seem to have is a kind of Q from the Star Trek universe (a playfully sadistic, inconsistent and chaotic entity who in this role, apparently, is happy to earn tax revenue from vodka but wants to ban ethanol in perfume).

The short-short version (and even that’s longish)

I’ll open this with a pop culture reference so old and obscure that you must leave a comment if you get it. Here’s the short-short version*:

There are currently over 300 substances used in perfumery that sit on various global watchlists for status changes under consideration/paths to potential reclassification and maybe even on paths to subsequent bans as a result. A couple of dozen are practically heading to the guillotine as we speak. Out of the entities that can propose and enact laws which result in eventual fragrance raw material bans, the European Union, its Member States and Parliament, the European Chemicals Agency and the EU Cosmetic Product Regulation are the largest “threats”.

DISCLAIMER: This entire article is not legal advice, nor an official statement from any entity, and should be read as a personal opinion piece only. It may contain inaccuracies, and I apologise if so (please go straight to the source, always - check the regulatory bodies and their available information directly; go join your local relevant trade associations, attend the meetings = this is what I’ve done for the last 10 years while getting more and more baffled by and interested in the complex interplay between different forces that affect what I get to use as the medium for my art).

If you already know that substances such as p-cymene occur naturally in many botanical materials and that there are two ways to include them in a finished consumer product via its fragrance inclusion, 1) either “as is”, added as such or 2) via the botanical material they are a natural constituent of, you may not need to read any more than this introductory section. You may already be way ahead in your own preparations for reformulations and new development. If you are fortunate enough to work in a large fragrance house that has an entire regulatory department who handle all the detail while your proprietary software will tell you what your limits are for hazardous components, you may not need to read any of this at all because you are in a relatively fortunate position as perfumer (though will still need to do an absolutely massive amount of reformulation over the coming years). If you are a fellow independent perfumer, I am so sorry because it takes even those professional regulatory people a full day job’s worth of time to keep up with what is currently happening. I recommend you seek some form of external help (not a therapist, although…) such as a regulatory agency, well-supported formulating and regulatory software or a compounding house who supports you in navigating the tsunami of regulations we’re in.

This is the current endangered shortlist (endangered by reclassifications and subsequent potential ban from various product categories):

p-cymene

bourgeonal

cuminic aldehyde

cyclamen aldehyde

cyclemax, or acetophenone

Some of these ingredients will probably be banned in cosmetics (and restricted in home care products), specifically p-cymene, acetophenone, and cumin aldehyde (when used as such, but not when their source is a Natural Complex Substance; e.g. an essential oil). “Used as such” translates to = no, you can no longer make your own lemon base with freely added p-cymene, but you can still continue using natural lemon oil where p-cymene is a natural constituent. The latter was a big victory for IFRA, Cosmetics Europe and IFEAT, among others when a derogation to the law was obtained to say that NCS are a special case. It was actually preceded by an initiative to get an agreement from the EU that Natural Complex Substances like essential oils aren’t “intentional chemical mixtures.” I keep calling plants “chemical factories” when I try to teach about natural constituents, but for a time it felt like European lawmakers were thinking that way a bit too literally. He he he. Gulp.

Since p-cymene is present in hundreds of natural substances including cardamom, celery, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, basil, lemon and so many foods we eat, it’s also really clear that our main exposure to it is from food.

Cyclamen aldehyde, bourgeonal, and cyclemax are also likely to be banned (from all sources). For all these ingredients, there is already an ECHA RAC Opinion classifying them as Repr. 1B

Lilial is already banned in cosmetics and restricted in household care products (≥ 0.3%).

Tea tree oil and heliotropine have derogation dossiers currently under evaluation, and what this means is that it is completely incorrect and irresponsible to send out emails claiming they have already been banned. Derogation is what has saved our botanical materials from the p-cymene auto-ban in cosmetics, so a derogation could potentially also save tea tree oil and heliotropine. One of the key ways our trade can help defend heliotropine is that there isn’t a viable alternative. I know that a delegation has already been planned to demonstrate this to key decision makers.

Now, there is an important footnote I want to add to this first section that is almost never discussed outside of our labs and offices: that is, how the scale of a brand or a business vs. the prevalence & importance of a substance (in their products) affects what fragrance companies and brands actually DO. Regardless of the laws, their timelines and whether something has already been banned or not, there is a difference between a mass-market shampoo which has its fragrance created and supplied by a top 5 fragrance house, versus a heritage perfume formula in private ownership. The former may be looking at the entire list of 300+ materials on those watchlists and getting requests from their customers (the fast moving consumer goods giants and other big businesses who own, manufacture and retail big global brands) to avoid everything on that list “just in case” (which is an utter nightmare), but if you are a small business with more agility to act as things happen, you may wish to wait and see instead (instead of needlessly discontinuing or reformulating successful fragrances).

Read on for background and context if you like. I’ll do my best.

Why is this happening? Who benefits? Why are essential oils under chemical regulations?

The first important background thing to note: all matter is chemical in nature. Therefore, essential oils, absolutes, resinoids, botanical infusions, natural isolates and materials created through novel methods like fermentation or upcycling (as well as all the materials created by chemists through research and development) fall under chemical regulations. It feels instinctively and emotionally completely “wrong” to have lavender oil classified under and regulated under “chemical regulations” but this is an important thought to hold on to in order to understand what is going on. Regulators classify botanical materials as “Natural Complex Substances (or NCS)” and that means “materials of natural origin that are made up of multiple chemical constituents”, e.g. rose essential oil which is a natural substance consisting of approximately 350 chemicals. Every absolute, essential oil, resinoid or homemade tincture of something you’ve grown in your garden is a complex chemical mixture and for you to use it in a product that you’ll give as a gift or sell, you must know what chemicals make up its composition and how those chemicals are regulated.

Second important thing: whether something gets “banned” or not is not just down to chemical regulations. In fact, the regulatory choke point can be further down the line, at product regulation level. A substance might be deemed unsuitable for a particular product type, but allowed in others. If, however, the product category in which the substance gets banned was responsible for the majority of that substance’s commercial use, then it can make manufacturing of and trading in that material no longer viable and it disappears from the market.

Third: safety is not a binary yes or no condition. Nothing can be declared categorically safe. Certain things can certainly be deemed categorically unsafe, but there aren’t any of those substances in fragrance. We don’t use plutonium. Safety in fragrance (and its uses) requires determining the hazardous properties of a substance, then understanding how the substance gets used, and how a mixture containing that substance (fragrance) is dosed in the finished product, plus how that finished product is then used by people. In other words, dose, exposure, exposure scenario = risk assessment and prevention of harm. For everyone who has heard or read that “fragrance is toxic” or that there is some kind of massive conspiracy by the fragrance trade, please, please check the exposure study which showed that even the most enthusiastic multiple fragranced product users do not reach anywhere near concerning levels of aggregate exposure. This is because all professionally made fragrances (those legally on the market and following IFRA) are already safe and because inclusion levels in products are much lower than people think (one of the magical things about fragrance is actually how effective it is at low levels and how it is therefore one of the safest hedonistic pursuits! Stick that in your pipe, EU). Last, but not least, I am urging you not to conflate “dislike”, “irritation”, “allergy” and “toxicity” because they are completely different domains and their use interchangeably is damaging.

Fourth: expecting all regulations and laws affecting perfumery to be logical, proportionate, sensible and easy to follow is a fool’s errand because depending on the different point of a fragrance’s journey from the beginning of its value chain, multiple different laws, regulations, trade association guidelines and circumstances affect fragrance directly and indirectly. Some regulations and laws seem inconsistent because they don’t follow a common sense logic (why do we need a hazard pictogram for aquatic life in a solid candle that will never be discarded down the drain?) but to understand why we must comply requires understanding of that specific framework (in this example, CLP).

Fifth: Political and business interests OBVIOUSLY affect lawmaking, regulations and the outcomes of various related processes. Lobbying, political messaging, ideological policies, profit margins, all of that exists as a backdrop to this very non-Star Trek world we live in. Nevertheless, there are genuine good intentions behind many of the laws we only see the tip of the iceberg of and many of the conspiracy theories about what goes on in the fragrance business are blaming the wrong entity (IFRA) or fundamentally misunderstand where the potential for profit actually is (and it certainly isn’t in needlessly banning raw materials because reformulating and replacing is down to the fragrance suppliers, not brands and is an astronomically costly pursuit).

Sixth: That rather sterile phrase “value chain” is nevertheless convenient shorthand for something quite complex. To understand fragrance ingredient bans requires some understanding of how the trade is actually structured and which laws and regulations affect each segment.

Seventh and last point of background: The fragrance trade has prioritised safety for decades. It didn’t always (there were no methods with which to really do that hundreds of years ago and by the birth of modern alcohol-based perfumery in the late 19th century, chemistry was advancing at such a speed that enthusiasm for new fragrance ingredients rather overtook any safety concerns at first. Oakmoss and bergamot could give people dermatitis or a phototoxic rash, fragrance factories would sometimes explode and certain novel chemistry discoveries were grandiosely used in perfumes until their toxic properties were properly understood). Since the birth of IFRA (International Fragrance Association) in 1973, the trade has been focusing on safety above all. Unlike tobacco where the product is toxic, full stop, and to continue trading in it means you must accept a certain portion of your customers will fall ill and die, fragrance was never THAT unsafe to begin with. And rather unusually for any trade, IFRA’s actual core mission is to go above and beyond on fragrance safety, by a commitment to follow the Code of Practice and its Standards. IFRA is not a lawmaker, IFRA is not even a formal regulator. It is a self-regulatory trade body, run by the trade, for the trade and acting as a kind of barrier between the actual lawmakers and fragrance itself. Fragrance is complex enough a trade to require substantial subject matter expertise. One of the main problems that arises is when laws are made without properly incorporating that expertise into the process. It may surprise some of you to learn that there are IFRA professionals who have spent years, even decades, defending perfumery raw materials from unreasonable bans.

How do we know that fragrance is safe?

Safe how? For the environment during its manufacturing? For the workers who handle large quantities of it undiluted? For transport by air, sea and road? For storing in factories and laboratories? For laundry care that gets into our water? For cosmetics that are applied on a large area of the body and left on, or for a shampoo that gets washed off? For a diffuser that has very little skin contact? For a perfume that one tends to spray on the neck?

Ah. There’s the thing. All of the above is starting to look like “it depends”.

And safe, safe meaning what? That it must be safe as used, so as not to present any risk to the person or situation it is being used in?

Or safe, as in, must not contain any hazardous properties at all? Or maybe some hazardous properties are okay and some are not.

Yes, well. Safety is not a binary condition, but unfortunately a lot of our current difficulties with trying to preserve the safe-as-used perfumery materials on our palette can be traced back to a new EU policy of trying to treat safety as an all-or-nothing question.

Is that water safe? Yes, if you wash with it (unless you happen to be an unfortunate sufferer of water-induced urticaria). Yes, if you drink it (unless you choke on it). Yes, if you swim in it (unless you drown). Yes, as an ice cube (but not as an icicle that falls on your head from a Nordic house during winter).

Safety always depends, as does toxicity, and for us to truly ensure the safety of our fragrance materials and the consumer products they end up in, we need to consider multiple factors and think about risk and minimising any potential for harm.

This is at the root of why there isn’t one reason, one entity or even one process that leads to a “fragrance ingredient ban”. Even the bans we are currently anticipating aren’t actually directly coming at us via one, linear route. The ban process is complex, it is tied to multiple laws and processes and it is not automatic. It is also not global, even though a ban in cosmetics in the EU will have a global effect because most brands will not have differently formulated versions of their fragrances for different markets.

The reason we can’t point to one entity and scream about losing “classic perfumes” is that fragrance is part of a system with multiple entities, stakeholders, suppliers, traders, manufacturers, laws and regulators. (That might explain why it’s easier for people to blame IFRA, which is ironic since it’s due to IFRA we have retained many of our materials in use. Some brands also ask their fragrance houses or create their own reformulation for commercial reasons and blame “IFRA” for the change in odour).

The route from field and lab to market goes roughly like this:

Early supply chain (growing, harvesting, processing and further refining materials; be it roses, turpentine or petrochemical feedstocks) → trading and selling → fragrance creation and new proprietary molecule creation → consumer goods companies of all sizes who commission and buy fragrance from the fragrance houses → manufacturing of the consumer products (laundry care, household care, beauty products, perfume…) → the brands market and sometimes also retail the resulting products → external retailers like Sephora may have their own rules (however unscientific…) that affect the whole chain back upwards → consumers (us, people, everyone) buying and using products.

RIFM and IFRA are relevant particularly to the fragrance creation portion of the value chain.

The current pressure that is going to lead to some bans in the next couple of years and beyond is mainly coming from the European Commission and its Member States. IFRA, IFEAT, Cosmetics Europe and other organisations have been working extremely hard for several years at a political level to raise awareness of what would happen if the proposed “automatic bans” would go ahead due to reclassifications as CMR1, even when safe use can be demonstrated.

Read the latest joint sector-wide statement here.

In the above chain, there are farmers, pickers, distillers, chemists, truck drivers, sales people, evaluators, buyers and perfumers, each stage involving different laws and regulations about substances, workplace safety, environmental safety and so on. Fragrance starts its journey as a substance, then a mixture, then a product, and different entities cover laws around each stage.

Here are some links to the above:

• CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)

• REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals)

• GHS (Globally Harmonized System)

• UNEP (Global chemical regulations database)

• EFEO (European Federation of Essential Oils)

• IFEAT (International Federation of Aroma Trades)

By the time fragrance is being sold to a cosmetics product or other consumer product manufacturer, it has already come under many laws and regulations.

The laws affecting perfume come from cosmetic regulations specifically, and this is where the “automatic ban” was going to happen (and may still do unless our entire sector jointly wins its battle for proportionate approach where safe use has already been demonstrated).

Just because a substance has a hazard, doesn’t mean the substance will actually be hazardous in its use (at the use level it is included, the way the product is used).

Cosmetic products come under all kinds of laws, including local (regional and country-specific) cosmetics regulations, product labelling regulations and more.

In the process of launching a perfume or any other scented cosmetic product to the market, the product must undergo stability and safety tests, there must be a product information file, and it must be registered on a product database. It is at these stages that safety assessors often require an IFRA certificate, regardless of whether the fragrance supplier is a giant corporation or an individual making perfume in their living room.

There are local member associations that are part of IFRA, for example IFRA UK or the Fragrance Creators Association in USA.

In order for you to begin to understand where most of the current pressure on the fragrance palette is coming from, I urge you to read the proposed revision for cosmetic product regulations. Some caveats I need you to go in with are:

1) Force yourself to question the language in this document and its real meaning. “Consumers are exposed to chemicals” (all matter, including lavender essential oil are chemicals and are treated as part of the “chemical industry” by regulators). “Exposed”, yes, but exposure alone is meaningless without dose and context (hazard is not the same as risk and to determine risk you have to understand the type of exposure). “High level of protection for health and environment” is an unquestionably good aim, nobody can argue with that, but what the new methods set out in the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability this refers to actually would result in if left at face value, is arbitrary bans of substances like lemon oil from Eau de Cologne or the alcohol from Eau de Cologne for no reason other than both of those substances have undesirable hazardous properties if evaluated without further context of how they are actually used in cosmetics and how consumers are actually exposed to them. My earlier quip about ethanol may have seemed a bit flippant, but this new methodology of eliminating certain hazards from cosmetics would mean an absurd situation where ethanol could be consumed in vast quantities by drinking but not allowed in your perfume that is only applied topically.

2) The public consultation they refer to had leading questions which seemed apparently designed to get a certain kind of response (when it went out, I had a toxicologist friend sanity check the questionnaire and he agreed). If you were asked whether you’d like “most harmful substances” banned from cosmetics, you’d say yes, wouldn’t you? Except that whether a substance is harmful requires context, and that context is exactly the part that was brushed aside. To try to give you a really mundane example we can all relate to - have you ever chopped chili peppers and then accidentally rubbed your eye? Chopping the peppers = no problem. Getting chili in your eye = well, now it’s a problem. Another example, this time from the relevant world of cosmetics and perfume, furocoumarins in citrus oils are limited in fragrances because if you spray your Eau de Cologne on your chest and neck and then spend a day in the sun, you might get a phototoxic rash. That is risk assessment and meaningful fragrance regulation in action. Examining hazards, determining whether there is a safe way to use the substance in question, and proceeding to issue safety guidelines. There’s a great sketch from the classic British comedy Yes Minister that is still relevant: How to get any result you one using a public survey.

Ok, ok, wow, how am I supposed to keep up with all this?

If you are a fragrance collector, do get a couple of backups of your favourites, just in case (and keep them in the dark in a cool place, unopened, because fragrance does go off at varying rates depending on how much air, heat and time it has been exposed to).

If you are an independent perfumer, I urge you to join a local trade association and/or get a really good regulatory consultant to help you. You will almost certainly start feeling the need for reliable and well-supported formulating and regulatory software if you work on more than one formula a week (less than that can be calculated by hand but requires robust and up-to-date data).

In general, do not expect any of the above matters to be comprehensively reported on in traditional or social media, so you can probably get better quality information direct from source (the regulatory entities and the various trade bodies engaged with them), and double-check the info from more than one source if you can.

I have deliberately kept this blog free for now and even when I start a subscription model, I will not be putting this behind a paywall. If you want to support my work, please consider buying my book, or if a business, do pop over to Olfiction.com to enquire about our services.

My NEXT letter to you will be wayyyyyyy shorter and more fun as I’ll tell you more about my “bonkers little book.” It’ll even feature a picture of that “chemical factory” inside a plant.

*P.S. The short-short version

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Dear reader,

This is my fourth blog and thousandth diary. I have been on a gap year from Helsinki University linguistics department since 1992 and it is beginning to look like I may stay in England. I appear to also have made my special interest in fragrance an entire career, not just a part-time job during other studies. Along the way I have lived many lives. First, the Finnish-Russian language school in Helsinki, every summer holiday from which was split in two by a Karkkila camp and a Jaala summer house. I took bags of books to both. Then, a stint of part-time jobs and that university linguistics degree which remains incomplete. A gap year in London turned to studies at London College of Fashion, a freelance career that later morphed to a fragrance trainer’s job for a distributor, after which I had a brief interlude working for a software developer, but soon jumped back into fragrant worlds. Three perfumery jobs, each with caveats about additional duties, all still bringing me closer to a competent skillset followed. Then the life-changing serendipitous moment of taking a risk and starting a business with Nick. I have now been a professional perfumer for over 16 years.

When I was 2 everyone thought I was a boy. I was a big baby. When I was 5, my godfather Kari Ovaska wanted a model to sit for him in his sculptor’s atelier and my mother managed to keep me still by reading Greek mythology to me. If you’ve smelled Infleurno from the cheeky little fragrance brand Nick and I started alongside Olfiction, you’ll piece together the link between this formative experience and that perfume.

At the age of 6, I learned to write and started filling notebooks full of stories. When I was 9, my mother sent one of them to a leftist kids magazine called Raketti (Rocket) and I didn’t know it had been published until the next issue of it turned up at home. I continued writing for them for a couple of years.

50th diary. 60th. 100th. In the ten years between six and 16 I filled 400 diaries. A few more stories popped up in magazines, now also one for teens. Someone at school found out that I’d written a romance and teased me about it. “Was that a true story?”

In the book I’ve just written, I talk about politics, perfumery and personal matters. Everything in it is true. But even fantasy can be true when told well.

This is probably one of the reasons why perfumery captured my attention and will never let go. To me, perfumery is like writing fiction using an olfactive alphabet aimed directly at the brain and soul, not to be interpreted through eyes or ears. To me writing a story and writing a perfume share many similarities. Input, output, structure, editing, intuition, genres, signature styles. Fragrance is a form of communication. It is the most direct form there is. Parts of our brain dangle out of the upper section of our nostrils and sample smell differences in our environment. When they catch an odourant, a process unfolds so rapidly and directly that the cognitive part of our brain is still putting its specs on to peer closer at the incoming data. What was that? Do I like it or not?

If the smell denotes danger, our primitive brain is already well ahead. There’s no time to write a blog post about floral nuances in the phenolic bonfire smoke, our brain is wired to tell us whether we should run.

Another reason I fell hard for perfumery as a career is the irresistible realisation that one can never learn all of it. There isn’t a finish line for an individual perfumer and the totality of perfumery knowledge is not obtainable by a single person. Even apparently small pieces of this trade take a lifetime to master, just ask your local GC-MS analyst or sensory scientist. Turns out those pieces weren’t small at all. Even exceptional master perfumers who have spent over 40 years honing their craft still keep their curiosity alive and continue learning. Every time you smell something together with another experienced perfumer, you learn something. Every time you smell something together with a trainee perfumer, you learn something. To be a perfumer is to think, judge, smell, analyse, learn and problem solve creatively. It is not a skill you ever stop improving and it is not a skill that can be learned by copying.

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It is so tempting to write a convincing backstory in which I was destined to become a perfumer. Especially since I am also a writer. Humans are really good at creating a narrative out of data and ignoring evidence to the contrary. I originally wanted to be a novelist. Then I wanted to be a fine artist or a textile designer. Once I was in London, fairly penniless and alone, I chose to compromise with what at the time seemed a pragmatic idea of combining creative work with a more commercially applied setting. I qualified as a film, TV and theatre make-up artist and wig dresser from London College of fashion in 1996 and had a couple of the best years of my life working on film sets, music videos, theatre and TV shows. This never took off properly, though, because I had no contacts, no support network and thus no way through past the gig economy. So I kept selling fragrance on the side.

Dear reader, wouldn’t it make a better story if I told you that my first word was “kukka” (Finnish for “flower”) as I crawled into my grandmother’s pansy border and grabbed a handful? Wouldn’t it be a better story to reminisce about the summer house in Jaala where my grandparents had an impressive selection of blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, roses, and more? How we amused ourselves by following Finnish folk beliefs around Midsummer and gathered seven kinds of wildflower.

Wouldn’t it make a better story if my mother hadn’t followed me to London where I had escaped her narcissistic personality disorder and wouldn’t it be a better story if she hadn’t killed herself.

She wore Y by YSL, Rive Gauche and Shalimar. She bought me my first perfumes when I was under ten, from a Swedish mail order catalogue called Fleur de Sante and from a French one called Yves Rocher. Then I got a job selling perfume after school and I bought myself Paris by YSL, Madame Rochas, Femme, Givenchy III and Balahe. My collection grew because we received freebies from distributor training. I travelled to Paris for the first time in 1988 and it smelled so strongly of LouLou that a whiff of it still puts me there.

In this blog, I am going to share vignettes of my life as a perfumer, writer and a person with a colourful past. We’ll see what shape my letters to you will take. Occasionally I’ll illuminate some of the more complex topics like IFRA and EU regulations (and that might be my next post, given there has been a bit of a rumour mill of late). I’ll post the formulas that I created to promote Demo Accords for Instagram here with additional insight about what I’ve used and why (and how they could be modified by others). There may well be letters from my travels. Next few months will feature a fair amount of that.

Why “letters of note”? I love word play and puns so of course I decided to double up “note” to mean two things. Since I think of writing a perfume formula as type of fiction writing, it already gave us our company name “Olfiction” - now it has given me a theme for this blog.

I love to share, enthuse, illuminate and educate about perfumery. Over the years the path I’ve taken out of necessity has accidentally made me a kind of Schrödinger’s perfumer: simultaneously inside and outside of the corporate fragrance trade. I plan to use that advantage for good, not greed.

Although, yes, it would be nice to make some money, too. It’s just never been my driving force and I have never pursued it exploitatively. When I set up paid subscriptions for this blog, I’ll keep the price accessible and will be grateful for each and every subscriber. Most content here will be free but when I do a formula deep dive or something more intense, that’ll be for paid subscribers only.

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In the meantime, you can support my work by buying the Demo Accords book and kit or by getting in touch for professional perfumery commissions via Olfiction.com.

Thank you for reading. I’ll write to you again soon.

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