Future Society Cloud Reverie Eau de ParfumFuture SocietyAs an MIT-trained scientist, Jasmina Aganovic doesn’t seem like the type to have her head in the clouds. But that’s literally where you could find her when she was creating Future Society’s latest scent, Cloud Reverie. The Founder and CEO, along with her team, flew in a propeller plane to capture cloud microbes in the lower atmosphere, then incubated and sequenced them in-house, which served as the foundation of the fragrance, resulting in a first-of-its-kind perfume.“In 2021, it was still the pandemic, and one of my colleagues sent me this paper about what nature was doing with all of this reduced human activity, which is probably long lost,” Aganovic says. “The paper was about microbial life in the clouds and how it was changing as a result of this decrease in pollution. I distinctly remember thinking there's life up there. And then I thought, of course there is because nature and life are not just determined by gravity and what we see on the ground—it's this entire planet, and it's up in the clouds as well. I became very interested in this idea. Particularly during the pandemic, when things were feeling very claustrophobic and uncertain, this idea of looking up at the clouds and thinking what is up there, and feeling a little bit expansive, was very alluring to me. This idea of bottling it up somehow is where all of this got started.”Future Society Founder and CEO Jasmina Aganovic (left) with former co-worker Jaide Jensen in the propeller plane to collect cloud microbes for the perfumeFuture SocietyBoston-based beauty biotech firm Arcaea, the parent company of Future Society, is known for making science-based scents that aren’t your average perfumes. Their first collection was essentially the Jurassic Park of perfume and used sequenced DNA from extinct flowers to bring their scents back to life using biotechnology. “We already had the capability to DNA sequence things,” Aganovic says. “We did this for extinct flowers, so we wondered if we could do this for life up there and try to recreate the smell of the clouds from a biological lens.”The Mission Impossible-esque flight over Boston took place in October of 2021 and only lasted about 20 minutes. “We had petri dishes of various sizes because we didn't know what to expect once we were up there, what the conditions were going to be like, if it would be easier or harder to hold big petri dishes versus small petri dishes, and if we needed a lot of surface area because there is not a lot of density in the air and the clouds,” Aganovic says. “There were a lot of questions around that. And then there were a lot of logistics around the actual flight—how high we needed to be, how we could do this safely, what speed the plane should be going at, at what speed is it safe to actually open a window? We were able to slow the plane down enough so that the cruising speed was significantly slower, so that you could stick your hand out the window. The collection itself didn't take more than a few minutes.”The view over Boston from the propeller plane to collect cloud microbes for the perfumeFuture SocietyAfter capturing real cloud microbes, those were then incubated and sequenced in-house. They got enough genetic material by January 2022 to identify the microbes and found 13 species, 30 odor types and 57 scent molecules, which became the foundation of the perfume. The bigger part of the work was figuring out what scent molecules existed in the genetics of these microbes. “We sequenced them and then looked for the scent molecules that their genes encoded,” Aganovic says. “That work took us longer to do, until 2023, for a variety of reasons. Figuring out some of these gene pathways is not always straightforward.”Those findings served as the creative brief for Master Perfumer Daniela Andrier who translated it into a cloud-like scent. “She saw the all the scent molecules that we had found and the story behind the collection, and she started constructing this fragrance,” Aganovic says. “Poetically, Daniela's whole thing with the fragrance was the beauty of change. She formulated it to not have a top, middle or base—she wanted it to be a cloud of notes that's continuously evolving on your skin, because she believes that change is a beautiful thing.” Collecting cloud microbe samples from the planeCloud SocietyFuture Society Cloud Reverie consists of notes of vanilla, iris accord, sweet sugar, aquatic blooms, oceanic fucus and musk. “I never thought microbiology would make me feel something spiritual, but it was very interesting to me that what we found up there, from a scent molecule standpoint, was more or less the types of smells that you associate with the clouds,” Aganovic says. “It's a little bit sweet, a little bit ethereal. We didn't find anything that was like leathery, zesty, smoky up there. It makes you wonder, even though we humans don't go up and smell the clouds every day, intuitively, we still recognize them. Does this mean that we're subconsciously more connected to the world outside than we even realize on a daily basis? Which would make sense because we're all nature and made of biology, so we all started from the same point.”Despite their specific scientific findings, it was important for Aganovic to give Andrier creative license. “This surprises people about us,” Aganovic says. “People think that because I am a scientist and we're a science-driven brand that we are all about precision and literally replicating everything that we found, but that isn't actually our brand. We don't think that science has the all-knowing rule of law or mandate, or superiority over art. We believe that everyone has something to contribute, and so every single time we've worked on a fragrance, it has always been that the perfumer has creative authority and license to use whatever process they find inspiring to bring the creative brief to life.”The petri dishes with the cloud microbe samplesFuture SocietyThe bottle also brings the fragrance to life. Meant to mimic a cloud, it has a deeper significance. “This was such a fun process,” Aganovic says. “With our original bottles, the approach was to stay focused on the juice. What we realized is that packaging is such a big part of the overall experience and storytelling of fragrance, so we needed to think about how our packaging was going to be an extension of the story that the fragrance wanted to tell.” There were two inspirations behind the bottle: Sculptural jewelry from Elsa Peretti and electrophoresis gels that are sometimes used for DNA sequencing. Ultimately, Cloud Reverie is a continuation of Future Society’s vision of biology as the next frontier of fragrance. “Our theme is using technology to get closer to nature, rather than technology separating us further from nature,” Aganovic says. “It's about going to a different place in nature and feeling more connected to it when it's not something that we can readily access. It's about having a different approach to creating olfactive experiences that might not have been possible before.”