Audrey Semeraro, Edeniste
Science was always going to be the ground that Audrey Semeraro built her brand on. ‘My father was a nuclear scientist, so science was there at lunch, at dinner… it was part of everyday conversation,’ she says. If you’ve read anything about perfumery – its technicians, its solvents and its molecules – you’ll understand that a segue from science to fragrance-making is barely a sidestep. For Audrey, whose mother modelled for fashion and beauty house Nina Ricci, the thread between the two was even shorter, but she was convinced that wellness should be thrown into the mix. ‘My intuition was telling me something was missing from the world of fine fragrance,’ she says. ‘I’d read that the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the molecular biologists Linda B Buck and Richard Axel, who discovered that our olfactory receptors are directly linked to the brain, and I thought, “That’s the future. Why not smell good and feel good?”’
Audrey’s dream of creating perfumes with proven emotional benefits became a four-year passion project. Having charged a lawyer with locating relevant scientific publications (‘The reading material is hard to find!’), the name of Gabriel Lepousez – a neuroscientist whose medical research focused on brain plasticity and olfactory perception – came up again and again. ‘I thought, “This is the man I need to get in touch with,”’ smiles Audrey. Over a series of meetings and emails, Dr Lepousez helped Audrey to build a global database of every olfactive molecule proven in the past 30 years to have a positive impact on our state of mind by stimulating the olfactory pathways. ‘Now I had the best neuroscience, I needed the best nose,’ continues Audrey, who was matched by Japanese fragrance house Takasago with master perfumers Aurélien Guichard and Jérôme di Marino.
Their task: to spin a new and patented Destress Accord (a comforting, cortisol-lowering signature of three white musks, built by Takasago using Audrey’s database) into a range of seven eau de parfums, and to incorporate further pathway-activating accords into six Lifeboosts, creating a two-step system with measurable wellbeing benefits.
The idea, explains Audrey, is to wear an EDP as your ‘foundation’ (resinous vanilla, creamy jasmine, shimmering orange blossom…) and layer a Lifeboost (anything from Happiness to Seduction) over the top as needed. And the measurable bit? By monitoring brain activity, stress biomarkers in saliva and physiological parameters, including blood flow and muscle tension, Dr Jeremie Topin, from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, could confirm in a sequence of clinical trials that Audrey’s Lifeboosts (each containing its unique blend of scientifically proven ingredients) had the required impact on physiological response and therefore the emotions.
‘Making the link between the worlds of neuroscience and fine fragrance is a revolution and evolution, you know?’ says Audrey. ‘More and more big companies will go into this and I’d love Edeniste to be leading this new wave.’
Making the link between neuroscience and fragrance is a revolution