Say Goodbye To Your Candles. Estée Lauder Just Designed A Better Way To Make Your Home Smell Good
Source: Fast Company, Elizabeth Segran
Photo: Ahmet Kusakog/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Estée Lauder Companies, which owns Le Labo and Jo Malone London, is partnering with a startup called Exuud that prevents your nose from getting desensitized.
We’re in a golden age of home fragrance. Everywhere you go, from Sephora to Whole Foods, you’ll find candles, diffusers, and plug-ins, all designed to fill rooms with irresistible scents.
There’s only one problem: Humans have evolved to stop perceiving scents after a short period to prevent overstimulation, a condition known as olfactory blindness. “It happens in seconds,” says Pam Dalton, an olfactory scholar at Monell Chemical Senses Center. “Our brain is optimized to detect changes in scent rather than continuous scents to help us respond to dangers like, for instance, gas leaks.”
Estée Lauder Companies—the $15.6 billion beauty conglomerate that owns fragrance brands like Jo Malone London, Le Labo, and Kilian—has just invested in a new technology called Exuud that promises to change the way we experience scents at home. Exuud has developed a new way to control the concentration of aromatic molecules in a given environment, and by modulating its intensity, it believes it can prevent our noses from getting desensitized. Estée Lauder Companies believes this technology could be a game-changer, giving it a leg up in the $24 billion global home fragrance market.
The Pandemic Fragrance Boom
When Estée Lauder founded her eponymous brand nearly eight decades ago, she believed that luxury fragrance could become a big business. Back then, women tended to rely on men to buy them perfumes, much like with jewelry. Starting in the 1950s, Lauder had the idea of created a scented bath oil that women would feel comfortable buying themselves. Shortly thereafter, she started marketing perfumes to women. With this heritage, it makes sense that Estée Lauder Companies has chosen to acquire many fragrance brands.
During the pandemic, a curious thing happened: While people were stuck at home during lockdown, they developed a voracious appetite for new scents. It was an unexpected turn for a moment of relative solitude. For decades, the fragrance industry had marketed scents as something you wore for other people. But suddenly, even though they were’t going out, people were spraying themselves with scents throughout the day. This led to a corresponding growth in the home fragrance category. “It became clear people enjoyed the smell of these perfumes, and wanted to refresh it,” says Sumit Bhasin, SVP of corporate fragrance research and development, at Estée Lauder Companies. “They wanted their homes to be full of fragrances.”
Today, the luxury fragrance sector is continuing to grow, with sales increasing by 8% in the first half of 2024 to $15.3 billion. Many perfume brands began expanding their home fragrance offerings. And Sephora, the largest high-end beauty retailer in the world, has been expanding its indie fragrance offerings, which includes both body and home products. Estée Lauder Companies also wants to tap into this booming industry with better technology.
The Fragrance Delivery Problem
Delivering scent into a room is more difficult than you’d think, particularly when it comes to fine fragrances, which are carefully designed to balance top, middle, and bottom notes. Heat-based systems, like candles and diffusers, break down top notes, diminishing the overall scent. Meanwhile, aerosol-based systems, like sprays and some plug-ins, tend to overwhelm your senses by sending millions of fragrance molecules into the atmosphere. This hastens olfactory blindness.
During the pandemic, Abhishek Breja–along with his wife Neerja–had the vision of coming up with a new technology that would allow you to control and program how much fragrance was released into a space. He brought on Jesse Killion, an engineer who specializes in technologies that involve heat transfer. Together, they came up with a technology that converts liquid perfumes into solid form encapsulated in beads, then releases it into a gas state with a new level of precision. They’ve currently filed 10 patents for this new system, and the technology through which they convert this liquid into a solid is a trade secret.
At first glance, the Exuud’s “smart fragrance delivery system” looks like a vase. The key to this technology are the capsule of beads inside. When air wafts over the beads, it releases aromatic molecules into the air, creating the scent. “This is how flowers release their fragrance,” says Breja. “This technology is inspired by nature.”
After weeks or months of using the device, all the fragrance molecules will be released into the air. You then dispose of the bead capsule, and buy a new one. The Exuud team has spent time trying to make the system as eco-friendly as possible. The beads are made from a polymer derived from plants that will biodegrade at the end of its life; it has an 80% smaller carbon footprint than comparable petroleum-derived plastic beads.
But the important thing about this innovation is that Exuud can precisely control how much fragrance is released by controlling the airflow. It’s possible to program the device to change the airflow, which changes the intensity of the fragrance in the air. “With spray devices, like a Glade plug-in, you’re flooding the room with a burst of fragrance molecules,” says Killion. “But here, we can release airflow in a controlled way.”
Breja believes that this is the way to overcome olfactory fatigue. By releasing fragrance at intervals, increasing then decreasing the volume of aromatic molecules in the air, our noses will not adapt to the scent. It’s important to note that this hasn’t been tested or verified by scientists; so far, he is basing this on anecdotal evidence.
Dalton, the olfactory scholar, has not seen this system. However, her research suggests that while changing the intensity of a fragrance may allow you to keep perceiving it over the short term, it is likely that our brains will filter out the scent over the long term. This is why people who deal with chemicals in factories or waste management are able to filter out these smells, even though their intensity changes over time. “The solution would be to change the fragrance every so often, so you can continue perceiving the scent,” Dalton says.
From a luxury fragrance perspective, this technology appears to be much better at preserving the complexity of the scent. Since there is no heat involved, even the most volatile top notes remain intact.
An Exclusive Partnership
Estée Lauder Companies has invested an undisclosed amount in Exuud, and it has also signed an exclusive commercial agreement that allows the conglomerate to integrate its devices into its fragrance portfolio. It expects the first products to launch in 2025.
Different brands will customize Exuud’s device in a way that fits into their brand image. Le Labo could create a device that reflects its industrial-chic aesthetic; Jo Malone may create something that is more classic and feminine. But the bead technology inside will be the same. Each brand will effectively white label Exuud’s technology, creating capsules of beads that look like just another product within its line.
Exuud is developing an app that will automate the way the device operates. Users can set the device to release scents at particular times of the day, for instance, or change the intensity of the scent to their liking. Exuud can even identify when the capsule of beads may be running out of fragrance, and prompt the user to order more.
While the pandemic deepened the world’s love of home fragrance, Estée Lauder Companies believes that it can build on the current explosion in the fragrance market thanks to this new innovation. And brands within the portfolio are currently at work incorporating the technology into their product lines. “We invested in this technology because we think it’s more than just an incremental improvement,” says Bhasin. “We think it could change the way we experience fragrance.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Segran has been a staff writer at Fast Company since 2014. She covers fashion, retail, and sustainability. She has interviewed Virgil Abloh, Mara Hoffman, Telfar, Diane von Furstenberg, and Ulla Johnson, among many other designers.