How Can Chanel No. 5 Be Matched With Different Ingredients?

Noam Sobel’s lab generated a metamer for Chanel No. 5 with no component from Chanel No. 5 in it. Two mixtures can smell exactly the same even when they have zero molecules in common.

A paper published in Nature, led by Arne Ravia, with Kobi Snits as a major contributor, sets out an algorithmic framework that predicts the perceptual similarity of any two molecular mixtures with very high accuracy. When two molecular mixtures are provided, the framework predicts how similar a person will smell them to be. The lab can also design mixtures with known similarities. The highlighted result is olfactory metamers: mixtures completely non-overlapping in molecular structure that smell exactly the same. A classic perfumer would say no to two mixtures with zero molecules in common smelling exactly the same. The lab produced them anyway, and anybody can recreate them. The Chanel No. 5 metamer is one example, and the approach is simple enough to repeat.