What are the key limitations of the tradition perfume bottle?

 

Dispensing fragrance manually on pulse points is ineffective and mostly lost in the environment. A standard perfume bottle is mostly alcohol based (70-97% ethanol) which dries the skin, can cause irritation in some cases, and has a strong chemical smell; alcohol can also disturb the delicate top notes when a fragrance is first applied to the skin.

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Fragrance ingredients from traditional retail perfume dispenser can stain delicate fabrics, especially darker colours (YSL Opium, for example).

 

Dispensing from a bottle fades after hours - very few fragrances last all day (odour from a standard dispenser is 80% less powerful after a few minutes). Since perfume bottles are activated manually, once the scent has evaporated from human skin, the aroma has gone - until you spritz again - therefore the bottle dispenser offers zero opportunities for the connected customer with limited "experiential" possibilities.

 

The spray (large alcohol-based droplets) can be invasive to others - especially those with contact allergies. It is also "overpowering" for the wearer in terms of the fear of bombarding people nearby with their own perfume. This kills the joy of perfumery if the consumer is worried about how everyone else is feeling about your own fragrance usage.

 

Glass perfume bottles are heavy, breakable and with the added risk of spilling alcohol on electronics goods (in handbags and/or on clothing), not to mention the inconvenience they can cause at airport security, or the negative impact some ingredients/VOC's have on the atmosphere.

 

With the traditional perfume bottle, there are limited options to blend and mix fragrances together or create your own personal scent environment - unless you carry your own fragrance wardrobe in your bag or on your body (risk of breakages), but the user still needs to manually spray fragrance on the skin. Clean fragrance start-ups are addressing the need for blending with small sample vials (Phlur and Skylar) that address "Clean Beauty" issues (trends in green, natural, non-toxins, hypoallergenic perfumes etc), but this lacks connectivity attributes for the digitally-native beauty consumer.

 

 

eScent address these limitations with our awarded patented for a wearable liquid fragrance dispenser.

 

We are developing a method for precisely metered fragrance delivery and release which could eventually replace the relatively crude, unmetered perfume bottle.

 

As fashion and technology collide, exciting new opportunities arise for the future of beauty and luxury, enabling the connected consumer to engage further with the human senses. In the modern world, we have grown to underuse our sense of smell because it has been replaced by the more dominant audio and visual senses. In pre-historic time, our ancestors relied greatly on what we underuse; cognition and imperceptible changes in smell, light, touch and sound that kept them alive. Their sensory appreciation taught them where there was danger, what foods to eat, when females were ovulating, what diseases they had and when it was time to sow and reap. Animals still rely on personally discriminating those precise changes. We humans have not lost these faculties but have grown to rely on data presented in other ways.

 

By 're-inventing' our sensory faculties through advances in tech and AI machines (that listens, sees, understand contexts and detect underlying health issues, etc), what we are doing with eScent is finding new ways to regain our appreciation and enjoyment of the sense of smell through data-driven wearable devices that personalize every interaction, delivering convenient, personalized fragrance experiences, better, faster and more affordable than the traditional perfume bottle.

 

With a further pending patent for creating and maintaining a personalised "scent bubble" around the user, eScent can best be described as the following:

 

• eScent is a wearable AI scent device that learns and adapts with every sniff!

• eScent brings a wearable, immersive and personalized scent environment to the consumer as a way to amplify sensory experiences, ultimately with a selection of fragrances to "subscribe" to different mood states.

• eScent offers a unique way to correlate the "Internet of Me", fragrance and contextual data with a wearable biofeedback intervention to enhance wellbeing and raise human consciousness.

• eScent allows the consumer to engage further with the human senses e.g. enabling consumers to sense context and dispense scent (or any liquid) accordingly, whilst extracting content experiences via mobile and IoT.

• eScent creates a localised and controllable 'scent bubble' (or sphere) that is pulsed intermittently and targeted towards the nose – it is pre-programmed by the consumer, activated by connected sensors and controlled by the consumer depending on personal needs – it concentrates on the immediate sensory space around the wearer by creating a personalized and customized sphere for the enjoyment of the wearer or a partner in the local vicinity.

• eScent fragrances, therefore, require far less alcohol (there is less need for the fragrance to evaporate on the skin), it addresses consumers concerns and the need for less contact on the skin (sensitisation), and legislation issues faced by the fragrance industry.

• eScent offers new techniques to establish and maintain a localised sphere of detectable levels of scent (or other liquid) dependent upon user context, environment, music data (genre/sentiment), activity data, weather, time, etc). Some techniques employ machine learning for personalization (for voice-sensitive wearable scent devices)

• eScent offers a low carbon, economical and sustainable solution without the need for glass bottles (risk of breakages, leakage, staining etc), less materials, less ingredients, etc, safer to the environment. 

• eScent offers a far lower fragrance dosage (versus the traditional atomiser spray droplets) as less is needed for the right odour performance/sensory experience (again this is in our new patent)

• eScent provides a 'fragrance wardrobe' customised by the user and tailored to suit mood, event, occasion, season, interview, party, travel, sex, etc triggered by smartphone, smart home, smart car, timer, tracker, biofeedback, including sound or other analysis-based trigger that is relevant to the situation, location or health condition.

• eScent avoids olfactory adaption, the consumer can really benefit from their own customised aroma bubble (environment), curated to their personal needs and pulsed throughout the day.

• eScent offers a solution for time-released top notes so you can experience the beauty and mystery of a fragrance (unlike having to wait for solvents to evaporate, by which time there's a risk you miss the top notes...) – again programmed by the consumer via a smartphone, voice, sensors or other stimuli.

• eScent provides a method to blend signature scents; blending one on top of the other to create a bespoke effect for individuality; creates a nano scent symphony – dependent on desires, wants, needs.

• eScent is kinder to human skin and health and fits clean chemistry and clean beauty trends.

 

 

At eScent, we believe that we shall look back to the early years of the 21st century and wonder why people sprayed toxic alcoholic solutions of fragrance ingredients onto their skin (our ancestors never did this before the 17th century), or why fragrance was mixed with laundry detergents in a way that most of it is washed into the ecosystem.