Sustainable Brand Haeckels Revives the Scents of Extinct Florals for New Perfume

Innovative skincare and fragrance brand Haeckels and Central Saint Martins student Tetsuo Lin have collaborated on a perfume project that recreates the smells of extinct flowers.

The team aims to revive lost scents of flowers by extracting small amounts of DNA from floral samples to synthetically produce them, allowing them to predict the gene sequences and create smell molecules. "In other words, we can get the recipe, gather all the ingredients and mix them together to recreate the scent," Lin says to Dazed. "While this is something we haven't fully realized yet, you can bioengineer yeasts to fabricate the same enzyme in specimens, which means you can create the same smell of samples 100 percent with yeast -- for instance, making a scent of rose without actual flower but only with yeast."

"To produce most scents, an inordinate amount of natural ingredients is used, and these ingredients (i.e. essential oil production) for the perfume industry have a high environmental impact, from water footprint to land use, which can be hugely damaging to ecosystems," Haeckels says in an Instagram post. "This new way of scent-making can lower the environmental impact by reducing water, land, and other resource usage."

While we don't know when the DNA fragrances will go onto shelves, we're keeping our eyes peeled for this new game-changing release. See more of Haeckels' partnership announcement below.