She was an Anomaly by Etat Libre d’Orange

Daniela Roche Andrier / CARTO of Givaudan, 2019.

She was an Anomaly is marketed as the first perfume successfully conceived and delivered by young, thus still not completely unsupervised, AI – Givaudan’s CARTO.

6 min.

Published on: 17.09.2019.

She was an Anomaly, the latest release from Etat Libre d’Orange, finally confirmed what I knew about myself but was not challenged to rethink: I am enchanted and seduced by the beautiful stories about inspirations behind the perfumes and deeply impressed by the artisanal minds with the knowledge to transform ideas into fragrances.

“When people ask me how I come up with a formula for a new perfume, I’m not sure I know myself. It’s like a wild bird that sings only when nobody’s watching. In a way, perfumery is like other creative processes, such as writing or painting, where you might have a theme or know what colours you’re going to use, but where there’s still that element of magic that comes out of you. Sure, creating a fragrance involves equations and formulas…but at its heart, it’s an emotional process, evoking all sorts of things.”, said the UK Times Online Daniela (Roche) Andrier, the perfumer of Givaudan behind this perfume project.

I live under the allure of this magic every time I inhale a perfume or even think about the perfumery.

The smell of air surrounding mangoes that initially pushed J.C. Ellena to create Le Jardin Sur Le Nil, the light smoke rising from the African fertility ritual Duchaufour translated into Timbuktu, Catherine Deneuve in the white coat that pushed Jean-Paul Guerlain towards creating Nahema… even the concrete in CDG Concrete would do, because behind any of these inspirations are the fragments of the authentic human experience.

Through the perfumes, those mangoes grown by the Nil, the holly African smoke, even Deneuve in the white coat sublimed into the most enigmatic rose of perfumery, became the parts of my human reality, my own experience and my memory, sometimes even my inspiration. I passed them on from my skin to become the same for someone else… The line below all inspirations is drawn, and the common denominator is extracted: behind the perfume, there is life. The fundamental human olfactive experience translated and transformed into the perfume formula only to become the real human olfactive experience again.

The circle is closed.

Or not.

Because we are heading towards the anomaly.

She was an Anomaly is a result of ELDO’s collaboration with Givaudan’s Daniela Roche Andrier. It was formulated in Givaudan’s newest high-tech perfumer’s tool, Cartoa highly intuitive and interactive set of enormous amounts of data and algorithms to manage them.
In April, Givaudan even used the term AI / artificial intelligence to describe Carto, which was introduced earlier this year

Daniela (Roche) Andrier chose the notes and supervised the creation of the formula.
She was an Anomaly, the first perfume made by young people. Thus, AI was still not completely unsupervised, but it was successfully conceived and delivered. 

So: no mangoes. No white coat.

And no story from the human olfactive memory, no “element of magic” that “just comes out” of the perfumer.
It came out of the computer.

The romantic, sometimes nostalgic, and—I hate to admit it —sometimes even traditional parts of me were emotionally confronted and struggled for a while with the story behind She Was an Anomaly.

– Carto- 
Ovdje možete pročitati intervju s Givaudanovom Calice Baker i saznati njezin pogled i očekivanja od Givaudanove umjetne inteligencije.

The concept inaugurated with Carto is strikingly fascinating, and Etienne de Sward used the innovation to present yet another witty concept. This time, the perfume concept and the story around it are not about what might seem like a moral, cultural, or social “anomaly” or controversy.
ELDO made a turn into meta- or auto-referential territory and focused on the perfume industry.

The auto-referential story “How the Perfume is Made” was opened last year with I am Trash—Les Fleurs de Déchet, also made in collaboration with Daniela (Roche) Andrier of Givaudan. The most wanted scent made from unwanted” also presented a meta-story about how perfumes can be made by introducing perfume made of recycled materials partly from other industries.

ELDO-Anomaly-Trash

However, I am Trash—Les Fleurs de Déchet does not address the controversial aspect presented in the second part: She was an Anomaly.

While testing She Was the Anomaly, I caught myself thinking that in the not-so-distant future, I might not be able to tell the difference between the man-made perfume formula and the one made by AI.
For the first time, and not in an abstract way but by smelling the possible future right from my wrist, I reconsidered many of my romantic and even traditional approaches to perfumery as a form of human olfactive poetry.

It all came down to how I felt about it.

About the future. 

Is a final separation between the industry and human art happening right now on my wrist? 

But, as soon as I started testing the perfume, how I felt about it changed into question (how much) is the difference significant

ELDO SWAA

Judging by the way the perfume smells, she was an anomaly, but she is not the anomaly at all: this is a nice and very wearable iris woody musk.
ELDO described it as a “soft cyber iris”.
She was an Anomaly who shares the noncontroversial, almost mainstream profile with I am Trash—Les Fleurs de Déchet: although it does not smell as well as known and as much as a compromise with the general consumer’s taste and preferences, the purely olfactive outcome does not deliver anything tempting or new. 

In the video material following the launch, the soft cyber iris is presented with a matching soft, pastel, tender, and casual photo of a young woman, as if taken in private, personal moments. The picture appears partly blurred and pixelated and disappears as if disintegrated by a bad transmission.
The woman seems out of reach, but here, nevertheless. 

The perfume opens with a very creamy iris, truly pastel and soft, and the discrete fruity layer appears very soon. Maybe only a drop of fresh fruity meatiness briefly changes the feeling of distanced tenderness into almost palpable liveness.

Contrasts are mild and smooth, but still there:
As the tender, fruity “living thing” inside the creamy, pastel iris disintegrates, its appearance seems almost like an illusion or a projection of something vivid.
The iris then shows its cold, almost metallic facet,  not intense but persistent.
The change features as an olfactive disturbance coming from the background.
The iris note, which keeps the olfactive picture coherent, finally appears as the cyber iris, impersonal and slightly metallic.

By this moment in the perfume development, a movie analogy with Her, the movie directed by Spike Jonze (2013.) was already shaped in my mind, maybe as my way of coping with many questions that She was an Anomaly:

I fell back into a melancholy and touchingly honest modern love story about the introverted and lonely man falling in love with AI identity, Samantha, Her.
Objects of love and longing, inspiration and meaning melted together, as both – She and Her – were constructed by (or born out of?) an AI.
The movie follows the love story from the first infatuation until disintegration and loss, which left the main character (Joaquin Phoenix) forever longing about the one he will never understand, as it was said in ELDO’s promotional materials. 

The movie’s end corresponds to the disintegration presented in ELDO’s video, with a slight difference: in Jonze’s film, distancing and vanishing are not presented as pixelated disturbances caused by bad transmission. The departure is compared with the reading, which for AI became too slow to grasp the meaning: “It’s like I’m reading a book, and it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now. So, the words are far apart, and the spaces between them are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story…but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now”, explained AI /Samantha in the movie.

As the perfume settled into the round and soft musky-woody base, I interpreted the predictably known base as the inevitable end of a love story between a human and AI. 

In the end, I had to come up with only one answer to many questions that ELDO raised:

No matter how we define the anomaly, smelling perfume, feeling it, and thinking about it are real and belong to the real human experience. No matter how perfumes might be made, we will always love those that impact us.

large

For anyone searching for a real olfactive challenge, She was an Anomaly would not deliver expected.

In an interview published in 2013, after La Fin Du Monde was released, Etienne de Swardt announced that the previous chapter had closed and suggested something different—ELDO 2.0.
The olfactive features from the earliest, best, and most daring and controversial releases (Putain des Palaces/Secretions MagnifiquesEncens Bubblegum /Jasmin et CigarettesRien…) have also faded into something new.

Looking over my shoulder at 2006 and 2007—the most fruitful years regarding both production and creativity—I can’t help but feel some longing, love, and loss for ELDO 1.0.

Still, I hope this ELDO 2.0, with its actual and relevant stories about perfumery and the perfume industry, will continue in Part 2.

Disclosure – Purchased.

  •  Le Nécessaire Collection by Le Jardin Retrouvé
  • Los Angeles by Gallivant

Responses

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    I loved this review!

    1. Iva Avatar
      Iva

      Thank you, I am so glad you liked it!

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