The perfumers building fragrance’s future are working two extremes at once, designing molecules with AI at Osmo and rescuing scent from apple pulp and spent roses at Givaudan and Etat Libre d’Orange.
Ask a perfumer where scent is headed and you get two answers that sound like they belong to different centuries. One points to the lab, where an artificial-intelligence company is inventing molecules that have never before existed; the other points to the compost heap, where the industry is learning to make perfume out of what it used to throw away. Both are drawing real money, and both are chasing the same thing: a way off the short, costly list of flowers the business has leaned on for centuries.
The lab side got its loudest vote of confidence in February, when Osmo, the digital-scent company founded by former Google researcher Alex Wiltschko, closed a $70 million Series B led by Two Sigma Ventures, with Stripe’s Patrick Collison writing a check. “Osmo is unlocking an entirely new sensory dimension for AI,” Colin Beirne, a partner at Two Sigma, said in a statement.
From the test tube to the trash bin
“Scent is our brain’s way of sampling the chemical slice of reality, and those molecules come into our nose, and then they’re discarded,” Wiltschko told Salon last year. Osmo’s whole premise is that software can now read those molecules, predict how they will smell, and design new ones on purpose. What Wiltschko is selling perfumers is ingredients that do not exist yet — and a lot of them are cheaper and safer than what is on the bench now. “As digital olfaction technology continues to advance, we believe it will significantly expand the palette of safe and sustainable fragrance ingredients available to perfumers,” he told the outlet.
Perfumers tend to flinch when a technologist starts talking about their palette, so Wiltschko heads off the obvious worry. “AI functions more like a powerful creative tool, similar to how power tools transformed woodworking,” he said. “It enhances the capabilities of perfumers rather than replacing them.” Osmo sells to houses, not shoppers, so its name may become familiar while its product never turns up on a shelf.
The other end of the spectrum is already in bottles, and the perfumers behind the shift sound genuinely delighted about it. Givaudan, the largest fragrance house, has built a line of ingredients out of what other industries discard, and its perfumers describe the byproducts as a gift to the nose rather than a compromise. “Beyond the undeniable CSR impact, upcycled ingredients also enrich the perfumer’s palette with new notes,” Gaël Montero, a Givaudan perfumer, told Formes de Luxe. “Our cistus NeoAbsolute has a more honeyed scent that is less leathery while eucalyptus NeoAbsolute is superb and much warmer, resinous, and ambery than traditional eucalyptus oil.”
It is happening across the big houses. “At IFF, we use oak chips from the production of Cognac barrels,” Juliette Karagueuzoglou, a perfumer at IFF, told the same outlet, describing a byproduct charred and carbon-dioxide-extracted into “a woody, sweet, smoky scent with notes of vanilla and rum” that she worked into Yves Saint Laurent’s L’Homme Eau de Parfum. Givaudan’s own catalog runs on the same idea: an apple oil pulled from leftover juice pulp, a rose absolute wrung a second time from petals already processed once, a woody note called Akigalawood built by biotechnology from patchouli fractions that used to be thrown out. The house counts an ingredient as upcycled only when at least half the carbon in it comes from reclaimed material, it says.
Reclaimed materials can carry a real luxury fragrance, and the labels leaning into upcycled ingredients are betting that shoppers will buy the story. Etat Libre d’Orange put Givaudan’s byproducts into a fine fragrance called I am Trash and dared anyone to be squeamish. “Do not throw anything away,” the brand’s founder, Etienne de Swardt, has written of the scent, “because at the bottom of our trash lies the fermented distillation of great love.”
What’s pushing fragrance to reinvent its ingredients
Underneath both bets is a supply problem that keeps getting worse. A great deal of fine fragrance still rests on flowers harvested by the ton. It takes roughly 400 kilograms of Centifolia rose petals to make a single kilogram of concrete, and about 700 kilograms of jasmine, picked by hand at some 8,000 blossoms a kilo, for a kilogram of absolute. Every one of those fields is exposed to weather, land costs, and the labor of people willing to pick before dawn, while a molecule designed in New Jersey (or a note rescued from a juice press) is a way to lean on them a little less.
The demand it is all chasing keeps climbing. Grand View Research valued the fragrance market at nearly $59 billion in 2025 and expects it to reach nearly $90 billion by 2033. That growth has to be fed with materials from somewhere. “Now people have a scent wardrobe. They have different fragrances for different occasions, moods, and different times of the year,” Harry Richards, an investment director at the fragrance-focused firm Manzanita Capital, said last year. “How customers interact with fragrance has changed.”
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