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https://www.barrons.com/articles/good-company-aeirs-bioengineered-fragrances-01673547641 Pvd Plasma Vapor Deposition
Luxury fragrance brand Aeir has adopted a unique method for developing its products, one based on bioengineering rather than botanicals.
“For hundreds of years the fragrance industry has relied on nature to provide building blocks for creating scent by means of extraction,” says co-founder Rodrigo Caula, 33. “We wanted to show that things could be done differently with bioengineering.”
Aeir fragrances are made entirely in a lab “without the need of extraction,” says Caula, therefore helping to protect the earth from intensive agriculture. “It’s possible to create beautiful fragrances without needing to take from nature.”
Caula, a Canadian-born, Los-Angeles based designer, has spent over 10 years working with Fortune 500 brands, including overseeing Tesla’s sustainability and biomaterials strategy and Yeezy’s innovation and sustainability direction. He met his co-founder, Italian-born Enrico Pietra, after both attended the prestigious design masters program at L’école Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Lausanne, Switzerland.
“We found the common interest of luxury design, craftsmanship, and sustainability,” Caula says. “Our approach stems from deep historical and cultural research— where we deconstruct various concepts from past times, and bring them to the future with a contemporary and futuristic approach.”
The pair, based in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, had already worked together at their luxury design practice NUOVA, collaborating with Cartier, Seed, and Adidas. In 2020, they were inspired to create Aeir as “a new vision for universal luxury,” says Pietra, also 33.
“We began shipping mid-October [2022] and have received unbelievable feedback,” Pietra says. “We have multiple luxury retail brands lining up to carry Aeir, with our first European retail debut slated for June 2023.”
The gender-neutral fragrances come in four scents: Wet Stone, a mineral scent inspired by the quarries of Carrara in Tuscany; Grand Rose, an interpretation of rose made up of bioengineered rhubarb and cedarwood; Suede, which contains notes of leather, saffron, and iris; and Virgin Olive, inspired by a Mediterranean garden, with bergamot, vetiver, and, “cannabis-like accords.”
The four scents are currently available in the Aeir Mini Discovery Set, featuring 2ml bottles contained within a PVD silver aluminum perfume holder.
The Aeir Mini Discovery Set costs US$69. Shipping from the Aeir website within the U.S. is free.
A subscription platform “allows users to experience new fragrances bi-monthly,” explains Pietra.
In mid-2023, Aeir will introduce its membership program, Aeir ID, which will provide a range of new products and experiences through their app.
“Our manifesto at NUOVA has always been to create carbon-negative luxury products—Aeir being the first case study,” Pietra says.“Our fully circular design approach has led us to create strategies for some of the most successful brands in the world and we wanted to demonstrate this through fragrance.”
“Each part of the packaging and product experience was engineered from the ground up,” Caula adds. “From fully recycled paper and ink-less packaging to the 100% recycled aluminum perfume system, everything was designed to be disassembled, recycled, and composted. Even the bioengineered fragrances themselves were created from scratch with the ethos to be fully circular.”
The aluminum fragrance holders—into which new bottles can be dropped, when the old ones run out—use “PVD coatings (Photo Vapor Deposition) coatings instead of toxic chromes, and other harmful metallic processes,” Caula says. “The implication for mining and disposing of chrome has severe consequences to our environment. We also wanted to demonstrate it’s possible to create a finish ‘more silver than silver’ without the devastating environmental consequences.”
Each Aeir Mini, meanwhile, is shipped inside a 100% recycled paper FSC certified Aeir Bag, which Pietra is “particularly proud of… It’s a beautiful user experience that opens like a retail bag.” The all-white bag is embossed, avoiding ink-use.
Aeir’s focus for 2023 is to introduce the full-sized aluminum Aeir Frame fragrance system, as well as a range of new fragrances.
“In 2023 we will introduce our first carbon-negative fragrance system—using carbon-captured ethanol and fully biosynthetic scent molecules manufactured in a laboratory environment, which minimizes botanical use and extraction,” Caula says.
Luxury fragrance brand Aeir has adopted a unique method for developing its products, one based on bioengineering rather than botanicals.
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