When the team shared the theme of REBORN with me, it really hit home. I’ve been pondering [rebirth] a lot over the past few years. I was moved to tears, actually. I trust my tears more and more these days to guide me in the direction of my heart. From there, associations came to me: birth, a mother’s milk, clouds forming and disappearing, the invitation of a white canvas or blank page … blinding light. I started thinking of ingredient building blocks in our sensory machine, how I might combine them. With a project like this, the AI doesn’t necessarily come into play—it’s more about the ease with which you can imagine various formulae. You can use the sensory machine as this fast, fantastic prototyping tool to smell multiple scent creations. You keep adjusting them until you land somewhere that feels right.

For me, the state of being reborn feels like playing with time and movement. This summer, I had the joy of attending the workshop of composer Thierry Thieu Niang. He’d have us do different exercises and suddenly say “statue!” We’d stop in our tracks until a new movement imposed itself. The act of being reborn is like diffusing the density of all that living and accumulated experiences with the lightness of letting go of what no longer serves us …  That white space of possibility and erasure conjured sensations of softness and tenderness for me—rice and milk, musk and orris—in tandem with something more vibrant and piercing: dry woods and high-pitched notes like metallic and pepper.

The biggest misconception is probably the belief that using AI is dehumanizing and devoid of emotion—the scent creation experience we offer is quite the opposite … Conversing about yourself with a non-judging entity that transforms your input into a unique scent is magical! Once people start smelling their scents, they love to share their impressions—why they think it smells the way it does, even if it’s not what they expected.

The smell of jasmine and rose are strongly connected to my childhood back in Iran, where I was born. I recall dancing around the flowers in my grandma’s garden.

Connection.