It’s our same old open thread poll, marking National Cat Day on Saturday and National Candy Corn Day on Sunday. Talk about anything you like — the fragrance you’re wearing today, your spookiest perfume ever, your favorite flavor of candy corn,* whatever.
Or, ask a question about fragrance, then see if anyone else has asked a question that you can answer…
French perfume house Caron has launched Tabac Blanc, a new unisex fragrance. Tabac Blanc joins Tabac Exquis, Tabac Noir and Tabac Blond in the Luminous Tobaccos collection…
From French artisanal chocolate company Maison Bonange, the Noir 70% Bio & Géranium bar: "The Porcelain Trianon was designed by Louis le Vau for the Sun King and included beds of rare and fragrant flowers. One can imagine that geranium flowers, very fashionable at that time, lined the paths of the gardens. In memory of this sumptuous building that disappeared in 1687, Maison Bonange offers you a tablet in which floral flavors are superimposed on the delicacy of a powerful and generous chocolate." 80g for $7 at Beautyhabit.
It’s Friday! Also, International Animation Day. Birthdays today: Erasmus, Levi Coffin, Auguste Escoffier, Edith Head, Evelyn Waugh, Jonas Salk. Our community project for today: wear a fragrance with geranium leaf, if you have one.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I’m finishing off geranium week in Tauer Phi — Une Rose de Kandahar…
To make sense of this baffling chemistry, researchers have turned to the computational might of artificial intelligence. Now one team has trained a type of AI known as a graph neural network to predict what a compound will smell like to a person—rose, medicinal, earthy, and so on—based on the chemical features of odor molecules. The computer model assessed new scents as reliably as humans, the researchers report in a new draft paper posted to the preprint repository bioRxiv.
— Read more in AI Predicts What Chemicals Will Smell like to a Human at Scientific American.