"I get the chance to see perfume formulas that I would never have thought of myself," says Apel. Because knowledge and experience often pose as limits to creativity: "I tend to prefer certain ingredients and want to make a very specific kind of scent," he admits.

Philyra is more impartial in her approach.

— Perfumer Dave Apel, talking about the artificial intelligence system Philyra (we have mentioned this before here and here). Read more at Artificial intelligence creates perfumes without being able to smell them at DW. (And Philyra's first fragrances have just launched: O Boticário Egeo On Me and Egeo On You; the text is in Portuguese.)

In the case of the perfumes Philyra made for Boticário, the brand asked for scents that would target millennials living in Brazil. Philyra compared formulas against scents that were popular in that area and age range and came up with two. The first, according to Symrise senior perfumer David Apel, smells like “things I only can associate with exotic cuisine … fenugreek seeds, green cardamom pods, carrot seed, all wrapped with a milky, buttery, rich base note.”

— Last week, when I reported on the AI system IBM is developing for fragrance company Symrise, I missed the more detailed description of its first two fragrance efforts. It's at Vox; read more at Is AI the future of perfume? IBM is betting on it.

Dave Apel, who started in the perfumery business in 1980, says Philyra learned as any perfumer would. “It essentially learned the combinations of materials that are aesthetically pleasing, if you will — things that have been traditionally seen to work together, a kind of balance of how the materials are harmonious or not, and where there is signature within a fragrance,” he says.

— The artificial intelligence system Philyra, created as a collaboration between IBM and fragrance company Symrise, will have its first perfumes on the market next year. Read more at The Scent of an AI at Datanami. (Also: Using AI to Create New Fragrances at IBM and Breaking new fragrance ground with artificial intelligence (AI): IBM Research and Symrise are working together at Symrise.)