Visualizing Perfume
Many of the perfumes in my collection are personal markers, ones that evoke moments from the past or take me to imagined new worlds — a few scented drops transport the mind through memory and fantasy. For several years, I’ve kept a perfume journal, writing fleeting impressions with the hope of changing experience into expression. Here language served as the brush to paint sensory images, but I found it wanting. There remained a far distance between my attempts and the nuances of those experiences. In reconsidering the way olfactory compositions might translate differently in words versus images, I thought the value of a visual expression is its immediacy.
That led me to my tinkerings with AI, using Bing’s DALL-E3 Image Creator to translate these sensory impressions into imagery by using perfume accords and scent memories as prompts. I realized the flaw in my logic. The fact that I had to create the prompts means that the images originate from the same text, so share limitations from the outset. The results were not as expected, but fun nonetheless. Just from being new to the technology, I had to learn how to translate words to images, “training” AI, and that has a built-in imprecision and unanticipated quirks. For example, DALL-E3 likes star anise pods and will add them as a stand-in for all spices. Also, smell descriptors are acquired as a a learned language. There are distinctive notes that don’t lend itself to easily expression in images: the inkiness of oakmoss, the bitter green of galbanum, the rootiness of iris. These are terms I’ve picked up over the years, borrowed from other writers, critics and bloggers. For inspiration in this endeavor, I owe a large debt to Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (perfume guides), Victoria Frolova (Bois de Jasmin), Katie Puckrick (KatiePuckrickSmells), Eugene Nizic (USmellsGood), Michael Edwards (Fragrances of the World) and Kafkaesque whose work have shaped the way I understand perfumes over the years, and whose influences have, directly or indirectly, made their way into these AI visualizations. I tried to credit any direct quotes or references. Each image below comes with a short caption about the perfume referenced. They are generally ordered by fragrance families (but some placed emotionally).
