Bio Scent
Cultivating natural scents in the lab
Scents are a mysterious material. They can evoke childhood memories, specific times, events and emotions. Scents have been around for thousands of years and are as appealing to us today as they have ever been. However, all too often these industries are not at all environmentally friendly.
In order to create natural scents and oils, a huge amount of natural resource is required. According to Chandler Burr, author of The Perfect Scent, capturing natural scents can be incredibly unsustainable, pointing to a few examples such as sandalwood, which is at risk of decimating forests in India, vanilla which is an incredibly labour intensive and water-hungry crop often grown in politically challenging environments and rose which requires a huge amount of land and resource for what is effectively very low final yields.
For this project, I aim to create luxurious and pure ‘natural’ scents in the lab. By effectively cultivating the scent molecule biologically in a bio-lab, I hope to achieve the purity demanded by current consumers whilst avoiding the unsustainable practices that are associated with harvesting them in nature.
Tetsuo Lin
tetsu117green@gmail.com