ByDarko Savic
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4 years ago
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Idea
Povilas S Feb 28, 2022
A company that produces perfume of your natural body scent
Image credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_7sGaHNHM
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Originality
Is it original or innovative?
Feasibility
Is it feasible?
Necessity
Is it targeting an unsolved problem?
Conciseness
Is it concisely described?
Bounty for the best solution
Provide a bounty for the best solution
Bounties attract serious brainpower to the challenge.
A company that makes the perfume of your natural body scent and sells it to you.
Why?
- A novel business.
- Let people know the true smell of their body.
- Give it as a gift to your partner as a reminder of yourself when you're far away.
- See what people you attract when wearing the perfume of your natural body scent vs. not wearing any perfume at all or wearing a conventional perfume.
- There is relatively little information concerning the natural scent of the human body - what goes into its makeup, how it changes, and how it affects others, among other things. The possibility of profiting from this would incentivize research and provide more extensive data.
How it works:
You go to the website of the proposed company and order a service of producing perfume of your body scent. The company sends you the equipment required to contribute to the production process.
For some time you'll have to shower and wash your hair with specialized odorless soap and shampoo to remove external scents and leave the natural scent of your body. The best would be to do the same with clothes you wear daily, sheets you sleep in, etc., the company could send a special detergent for washing clothes and bedding as well.
After the phase of neutralizing your body scent, you'd have to take samples of your own smell. This could be done by applying an ointment on your skin and hair to absorb natural volatile compounds. The process would be similar to keeping a hair mask/wearing compresses on your body overnight while you sleep. The company would send a manual with detailed instructions on how to do it properly.
In the morning you collect all the used ointment in a sample jar provided by the company. When the process of harvesting the scent is done (it could take days, depending on the quantity of sample material necessary to collect enough volatile compounds) you send the filled sample jar back. The technicians then distill the volatile compounds from the ointment, make a perfume out of them and send it to you.
This art project confirms the feasibility of the idea. The video also proves that there would be a demand for such a product.
Eliminating/decreasing malodorous notes of the body scent: While the most distinct notes of a natural human body scent come from the most sweaty parts of the body, like armpits, and are unpleasant to most people, many different endogenous volatile compounds can be found on different parts of the body varying in quantities and odor types/intensities.
By taking the scent samples from clean, shaved skin and those body parts that have less sweat glands it would be possible to decrease the amount of malodorous compounds and increase the chances of people liking the natural scent of the body.
However, excluding strong, sweat-like odors means you'd have to collect a lot of volatile compounds giving off weak scents that are hardly noticeable under normal circumstances. That's why the process of collecting a proper scent sample might be long, but worth the effort.
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2574753/
2
Creative contributions
Market it to people in love
People that are in love or in long-distance relationships would be a good audience to sell this to.
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Produce body perfume including only fragrant or neutral smelling endogenous compounds
From this article. You can see a list (table 4) of volatile compounds found on human skin (upper back and forearms). While the article doesn't provide information on the type or pleasantness of smell of each compound, I did some quick research and some of the endogenous (not coming from external sources like cosmetics or hygiene products) compounds do smell neutral to good (e.g. 1-butanol; 3-hexanol; 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one) some of them are used in the food industry as flavorings.
The article also indicates that different subjects have a different make of compounds present on their skin.
Such analysis as the researches performed in the mentioned study could be done on the customers of a proposed company before making the perfume. Then only the neutral smelling or fragrant compounds would be used to produce the perfume. The quantities of specific compounds to be put into the perfume mix would be determined according to the quantities of those compounds naturally present on the skin (they'd only be multiplied by a certain magnitude).
Wearing such perfume would then let the person emphasize the pleasant notes of their natural smell.
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Shubhankar Kulkarni3 years ago
I like the idea. Here are a few things you may need to take care of before initiating the process of smell extraction. The body odor is caused by a combination of bacterial secretions and sweat on the skin. Therefore, the body odor may change due to hormonal imbalance, the food you eat (for example, garlic and onion make the sweat more pungent), infections, medications (for example, antibiotics that change the composition of the skin bacteria), or underlying conditions like diabetes. It would be helpful to maintain a healthy diet (avoid these foods) and healthy mind, do the necessary blood tests and check for underlying conditions and infections, and wean off medications before you give a sample for sweat collection.
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Povilas S3 years ago
Shubhankar Kulkarni The interesting thing to think about here is - can those disbalances sometimes make your body smell better than when it's in balance, e.g. if antibiotics do kill some bacteria (although probably they shouldn't affect the microflora of the skin surface) which metabolites contribute to the unpleasant notes of your body scent the scent might improve as a result of that. I believe hormonal imbalance also could affect the body scent both ways - make it either more malodorous or more pleasant.
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Shubhankar Kulkarni3 years ago
Povilas S Agreed. The question, then, is are we trying to make the greatest scent a person can achieve or a scent that the person usually smells like and is identifiable. What you say will work for the former but for the latter, original body smell may need to be preserved.
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General comments
Aashi Agarwal3 years ago
Povilas S I came across this video of the art project you mentioned 2 years ago when I temporarily developed interest in perfumery. I absolutely loved the idea and the first thing that came to my mind was preserving the very distinct smell that new born babies have. I looked into it further and came across this French company, Kalain that helps preserves the smell of your loved ones in a bottle. I wonder why it is not more popular.
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Povilas S3 years ago
Thank you, Aashi Agarwal! Cool, so the company does exist then, no wonder it's not easy to find on the web, they're French, although they do have an English version of the site, it's complicated to find such websites if you don't search in their main language.
I've read through their website, they produce the body scent perfume in a different way than the girl in the art project did or that I propose in this idea. They examine the chemical composition of the body scent lingering on the garment that you provide for them and then recreate it, producing the perfume. This means they use natural or/and artificial odorous compounds and solvents to produce the perfume in a "mainstream" way. I'm not saying this is bad, it just has its own pros and cons.
Pros: It simplifies the procedure of harvesting the scent - sending the garment with the lingering scent of a person is enough; The final product looks nice and fashionable (like any typical perfume that most people are used to), the liquid is clear; You can produce large quantities of the perfume.
Cons: The smell is not natural, it's a chemical replica of the original scent. They claim that the perfume scent is 100 percent identical to the scent of the garment, but this simply can't be true. The reason I don't like mainstream perfume is that their smell is too intense and has chemical notes in it, this is because of the use of solvents and artificial compounds to make them.
The method of capturing the body scent I propose in this idea is more similar to distilling essential oils from plants. The odorous compounds present in the final perfume will be the original compounds produced by the body, I think that's the way the girl in the art project did it as well.
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Shubhankar Kulkarni3 years ago
Aashi Agarwal Great concept of preserving the baby smell. It could have applications other than those for entertainment purposes. It could be used in therapy for post-partum depression or depression coming from losing a child. It could be used to train hunting dogs or military dogs so that they don't harm babies in any way. And if they find a baby during the war, they alert the soldiers and the baby is taken to safety.
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jnikola3 years ago
I really loved the idea of having someone's smell next to you all the time. It brings back memories in a different way than pictures and videos.
What I am interested in is how novel is your idea compared to what the girl was doing in the video you linked.
She mentioned that she produced human perfumes, that she did it probably because she was in a long-distance relationship, and that she was trying to offer a new dimension to the technology that deals with "realities", virtual or any other. I understand you want to market it, but the project was in 2016, so she could probably be doing that already, and then this idea is not bringing anything new. Maybe I am blind to see the potential and I sound like I want to undermine you, but I have no bad intentions, just want, due to the nature of the products, to start thinking of new tricks of how to make the idea more appealing for the investors, researchers, or customers.
I would suggest different usage of these smells for the research or technology implementation, new ways of smell extraction, necklaces with body scents, drinks with body scents, coating inflatable sex dolls in your long-distance partner smell, or anything that uses the already invented product of the girl in a new way, for a new cause or a gives a new service.
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Povilas S3 years ago
J. Nikola The girl in the video is an artist, she did it as a single art project, she doesn't seem to be interested in marketing this or even selling the perfume on a small scale. You can check out her webpage - she continues to do various art projects. I also didn't manage to find any company doing something similar through a web search and I bet there is no such company, if you'll manage to find something please mention it in this session.
The art project was not the only inspiration for the idea, it was simply reassurance that this could be done on a technical level. The greater inspiration for this (although purely fictional) is the book and the movie "Perfume, the story of a murderer". By the way, the method that the protagonist of that story uses to extract human scent is very similar to the means used in the art project.
The girl used the simplest and most practically convenient way for making such "perfume" - she basically extracted the scent from sweat (took samples from the body when it's the most sweaty and smelly - after workout, after sex, etc.), while this is convenient practically it doesn't answer the question how does a clean, sweatless body smell. E.g. if you try to smell the skin of your forearm, how does it smell? How does that smell differ from the smell of other people's skin?
You can hardly smell anything because there are not enough volatile compounds present there, those small amounts might nevertheless still affect people on a subconscious level. If you could make a concentrate of those, you could smell it clearly then. That's what the idea is mostly about.
Such business also would have to face practical difficulties that I mentioned in the "how it works" part, namely that taking proper scent samples from the body to produce enough volatile compounds for making perfume is not easy, especially if you don't involve the most sweaty and smelly body parts.
The girl took samples from people she knew, so it was rather easy, but the company selling this to customers would have to either use the approach that I proposed, where people do it themselves and then send the samples, or otherwise, the customers would have to spend some time in company's facilities and have the staff do it for them.
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