PHOTOGRAPHY Minji Suh and Naomi Ngoo
Ahead of London Fashion Week, I received a mysterious email invitation with a simple instruction: “Turn a Spoken Memory into Fragrance”. I didn’t expect to find myself plugged into a machine that looked straight out of a science fair, telling a screen about the dog walk in rural Aberdeenshire I spent much of my childhood wandering, then leaving with the best-smelling perfume I’ve ever owned.
Index, a fragrance house founded by the couple Tigris Li and Isabella Smith, made the experience possible. Li is an artist and creative technologist; Smith is a perfumer and fashion designer. Together, they’ve created a system that translates the stories people tell into personalised fragrances, using AI to interpret the emotional and sensory details of a memory and turn them into a custom blend of different scents.
I took my little vial everywhere during fashion week, where I was stopped so often to be asked what I was wearing that I practically became an unofficial salesperson for the brand. Each time, I got to tell the story behind it: my childhood memory, interpreted by a machine, turned into a custom scent just for me. Even my Uber driver told me he loved how the perfume layered with his cologne – and with blending different scents at the heart of Index’s technology, this felt like a particularly fitting endorsement.
While the premise might sound like another AI-powered novelty, the duo behind the brand have a more considered idea of what the technology can achieve, and what it shouldn’t. Li and Smith met after studying at Central Saint Martins, where Li studied graphics and Smith studied fashion print. Their studios were next to each other, and they began naturally supporting each other’s projects. Building Index together felt like an easy extension of that collaborative relationship, bringing their respective interests in design, technology and fragrance under the same roof. It’s perhaps an unexpected combination of skills for a brand operating at the intersection of AI and beauty, but that’s precisely what makes Index so interesting. Neither founder describes the business as a tech company that happens to make perfume. For them, the fragrance comes first.
The original idea was developed for an installation Li created with Converse in 2024. “My outrageous idea was: what if you could smell people’s memories?” she says. The first version worked with a London-based perfumer to curate scents, but the process was slower and less immediate than the experience Index offers today. The project evolved the following year, when Li was invited to showcase the installation for an internal Google event. Working to a tight deadline, she built the desktop machine that would become the basis of the current format. A subsequent public event in California showed her how powerfully people responded to the experience, with visitors becoming emotional and sharing their stories alongside their fragrances.
[Fashion brands] were really excited about capitalising on the data, but that’s not the point of our installation whatsoever.
At first, Li considered licensing the technology to another company, but conversations with a fashion house left her feeling uneasy. “They were really excited about capitalising on the data,” she recalls. “That’s not the point of the installation whatsoever.” The idea of turning people’s intimate memories into a commercial resource felt extractive, particularly for a project intended to give something personal back to its participants. So Li and Smith decided to build Index themselves, keeping the technology in service of the fragrance, rather than the other way around.
During my session, I was asked a series of prompts that led me to recall a childhood walk with my dog in a field near my parents’ home. I described the memory and its setting, then watched as the machine translated my words into a fragrance. I hadn’t specifically asked for honeysuckle – in fact, the entire interview never once asked me to describe smell – yet the fragrant shrub appeared in my finished perfume. My parents’ garden is full of it, so the note felt uncannily familiar, even though I hadn’t consciously suggested it to the machine.
I needed to understand how this had happened, and resident perfumer Smith was happy to lift the veil. Rather than simply matching individual words to fragrance notes, the system analyses the emotional context of a story, including nuances in someone’s speech and the pauses they take to reflect. It then selects from nine fragrance bases developed by Smith, each a complete composition of top, middle and base notes designed to work alone or in combination. As she explains, “Each of the nine bases is a jigsaw piece that then fits with the others.”
The machine combines between one and three bases in different proportions, drawing on familiar ingredients and more abstract olfactory ideas – from ‘pink pepper’ to ‘static electricity’ – to create what Smith describes as “fantasy notes” that build evocative, cinematic worlds. The AI isn’t creating a definitive record of my childhood; it’s interpreting the story I chose to tell through a palette Smith has carefully composed. Memories are subjective, and the way we describe them can change over time. The resulting fragrance gives that memory a physical form, rather than claiming to recreate exactly what it smelled like.
“We really believe in the importance of human skill,” Smith asserts. She isn’t looking to replace perfumers; Index gives her expertise a new way to reach people, allowing them to take part in creating a bespoke scent without the expertise or high price tag of commissioning one themselves. The craft behind the system is just as hands-on. Smith blends the perfume batches herself, while Li built the machine and even hand-soldered its circuit boards. Its wires and components are deliberately left on show, making the installation tactile, and a little theatrical. “AI is the most camp object that we’ve ever experienced, in that it’s like a performance, but people forget that because AI now knows how to speak like us and have our voices,” Li explains.
We don’t want to have your personal memories; that’s so intimate. It’s something that you enter, but you leave with something of your own, and it’s not extracting out of you.
How Index’s AI interprets a personal story is only part of the conversation; there’s also the question of what happens to that story once it has been shared. According to the founders, Index doesn’t retain the full conversation or its transcription, but it keeps the fragrance formula so customers can reorder their perfume, along with a summary of the memory and a title generated from it. Users can delete their data at any time from their account or by contacting the duo
The decision to retain the perfume formulas came after an earlier installation revealed how important it could be. One participant had created a fragrance inspired by her late mother, then returned wanting to recreate it when she missed her. The original system had deleted the formula after the perfume was made, meaning it couldn’t be reproduced. For Li and Smith, keeping the formula allows the fragrance to become something people can return to, rather than a one-off experience that disappears. But it also raises a responsibility to be clear about what is stored and why. “We don’t want to have your personal memories. That’s so intimate,” Li explains. “It’s something that you enter, but you leave with something of your own, and it’s not extracting out of you.”
Their candid explanation doesn’t mean all questions around the ethics of AI usage disappear, but it does suggest the founders have thought seriously about the relationship between the experience they’re offering and the information people share to access it. In a beauty industry increasingly interested in AI-powered personalisation, this distinction is essential, and their recognition of these concerns is comforting. A memory can be an unusually intimate thing to hand over, and customers should know what happens to it afterwards.
Already, Index has begun exploring how the system might work beyond individual memories. Li and Smith collaborated with designer Susan Fang on a fragrance connected to her SS27 collection, Air Illusion, drawing on its themes and atmosphere alongside Fang’s own scent preferences. They’re interested in working with other designers, artists and creative communities, finding new ways for the technology to interpret a particularly intangible world. It’s a natural extension of the founders’ shared creative background, with the machine acting as another way to translate ideas into something sensory and shared.
For now, though, the most compelling aspect of Index remains the intimacy of the original experience. Scent is deeply personal, and unlike a photograph or a journal entry, it can share the evocative qualities of a memory without oversharing its most confidential or confessional details. I’ve kept wearing mine, and I still find myself telling strangers how it was made.
We don’t believe in creating things, especially with new technologies, without a purpose.
I’ve also found myself thinking about whether a fragrance made from a memory could mean something to my grandmother, who has dementia and now lives in a care home. I don’t know whether it would evoke anything for her, or whether the experience would be comforting. But the possibility has stayed with me, as I have reconsidered how scent can convey and share meaningful moments through a method that transcends ability, language, or lived experience.
For Li, the purpose of the brand’s in-person installations has always been what users take away. “Every experience is worth remembering because it’s part of being human,” she says. “I don’t believe in creating things, especially with new technologies, without a purpose or being able to answer why or a message to communicate.”
At a time when AI is advertised as an agent to automate, accelerate and extract, Index offers a different proposition. The technology is still doing real work, and its limitations deserve scrutiny. But the ambition here is to make something personal tangible, with human craft at its heart.
Discover Index Fragrances at its pop-up at 30 Cheshire St, E2 6EH until Sunday 25th October.
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