Whenever you walk onto a department store’s fragrance floor, you’re greeted by dozens of brands offering sample strips in every direction — and there aren’t nearly enough coffee beans to cleanse your nose in between smelling all of them. With 1000’s to select from, how anyone is purported to find their scent? Sure, TikTok can inform you a dupe for Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 (nothing really compares though) or you may read an illustrious description about how Glossier You develops in a different way on everybody’s skin, but fragrance is personal. And nobody knows higher what smells good to you than you — aside from perhaps a robot.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten nosy and commenced difficult the classical paradigms of fragrance discovery and creation. For hundreds of years, the fragrance industry has relied on finely attuned human perfumers who’ve honed their skills through years of rigorous training and apprenticeship. Some notable examples: Master perfumer Anne Flipo created iconic scents including Lancome's La Vie Est Belle and YSL’s LibreDominique Ropion is the mastermind behind Frédéric Malle’s Portrait of a Lady and Paco Rabanne's Invincibleand Rodrigo Flores-Roux is liable for Clinique’s Happy and Tom Ford’s Neroli Portofino. Each of them has dreamed up unique scents, but what they share in common is that their craftsmanship demands the mastery of ingredients, a profound understanding of composition, and, after all, their sense of smell.

Typically, making a fragrance can involve upwards of 100 people and a series of steps: A client’s temporary is distributed to a fragrance house, then an internal team — including perfumers, evaluation, sales, regulatory, and marketing — works to develop a scent based on what the client wants. The formula goes to a lab, where the perfume is initially made, after which the team presents it to the client, who may like it or send it back to be reworked. With this historically lengthy process, even a number of the biggest experts are open to creating the timeline significantly more efficient.

Meet the experts:

• Calice Becker is the vice chairman perfumer at Givaudan and director of Givaudan Perfumery School in Paris.
• Carlos Huber is an independent fragrance developer and founding father of Archiste.
• Delphine Helin is the international retail services director for YSL Beauty.
• Mindy Yang is a fragrance designer and the CEO of Perfumarie.