In a former shop on Ginnekenstraat, a pedestrian street in the Dutch city of Breda, you can answer a short questionnaire about yourself and walk out less than an hour later holding a perfume that did not exist when you arrived.
The questions are not the ones a sales assistant asks. What colour best represents you. Where would you go right now, if you could go anywhere at all. How would you describe your style.
You answer, a set of algorithms reads your replies, and a machine in the room composes a scent to match, the bottle filled and labelled while you wait.
The company that built the room is called Scentronix, and for the better part of a decade it has argued that the way the world buys perfume is stranger than we admit.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Its founders, the Dutch artist and filmmaker Frederik Duerinck and the scent designer Anahita Mekanik, like to frame the strangeness as a question: why should roughly 800 people decide how 8 billion humans smell?
