April 2023

Together with her start-up Arcaea, MIT grad Jasmina Aganovic has been using biology to attempt to make the sweetness products of the long run more about individualism and consumers attending to know their bodies. Arcaea raised $78 million in Series A Funding from investors including Chanel, Givaudan and Olaplex through the COVID-19 global pandemic, and has just launched its first ingredient technology, ScentARC, which is geared toward deodorant brands. Designed to focus on specific underarm microbes, the patent-pending prebiotic technology shifts a user’s odor profile by selectively and naturally stopping production of odorous compounds without antimicrobials or masking smells. “Our mission is to make biology essentially the most desired technology in beauty,” Aganovic said. “In terms of the $25 billion deodorant...