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The Inara Signature perfume. (Courtesy Inara)

The Neuroscience-Based Fragrance Brand Pairing Scent With Soundscapes to Create Calm

Brittany Dennison

February 25, 2022
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Olfaction is our swiftest sense. Unlike new information detected by the eyes and ears, which is absorbed by the thalamus, a structure inside the brain, then relayed to the organ’s interpretive regions, smells zoom along dedicated pathways directly into the brain’s olfactory cortex for immediate decoding. That area of the brain also contains the limbic system and the amygdala, where emotions are made and memories of them are stored—which is why scents, feelings, and memory are closely intertwined.

Fragrance developer Elsa Bustamante and product designer Youmna Aoukar, who both practice meditation, wondered if they could harness the relationship between scent and memory to promote well-being through a perfume—one that triggers a positive recollection every time it’s put on. In 2020, they co-founded the fragrance brand Inara, which creates roll-on scents with corresponding soundtracks that serve as portable tools for creating calm.

Inara’s path to tranquility begins inside the bottle. Its inaugural perfume, Inara Signature, was designed by Bustamante and Aoukar’s longtime friend Mackenzie Reilly, an up-and-coming perfumer at New York’s International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF). Using an IFF proprietary tool called BrainEmotion, a database of psychological effects that various perfume ingredients have on the brain, Reilly selected scents that promote peace of mind. A sunny central note of bergamont, enveloped by fresh, exhilarating layers of sandalwood, vetiver, rose, and cedar, form the resulting perfume.

The fragrance comes with a 10-minute violin soundscape, performed by Brazilian musician Andrei Matorin and accessed via a QR code. Users are encouraged to listen to the meditation as they apply the perfume for the first time, creating a memory of the scent and the emotion brought about by the track. From then on, the perfume can be used to conjure up that feeling.

Three additional scents, each with its own audio, are currently in the works, including 528 Hertz, a spicy, floral aroma accompanied by a different violin melody. For a more lively experience, look out for Arbol del Tule, a forest-like bouquet paired with a recording of drums, or Ikaro, which smells of woody incense and is amplified by a track of rhythmic chants.

# Fragrance# Health and Wellness# Science

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It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.