Eau de Toilette Chinese Gardenia

Headspace fragrances are based on a technology that captures scent molecules directly from their surroundings. A closed system is placed over an object – a flower, for example – in which the volatile aroma compounds collect and are then analysed. The resulting data make it possible to reconstruct the scent precisely in the laboratory. This allows even smells such as the scent of a flower in the wild or rain on warm asphalt to be recreated, which cannot be obtained through conventional extraction.

Julia Asenbaum is a botanist, and she wanted to know what a flower really smells like — not the cliché, but molecule by molecule. Using “headspace” analysis, she captures the scent of living plants and whole landscapes and rebuilds it as perfume; she calls it “Olfactory Realism.” Her most famous piece: Klimt’s Rose, reconstructed from the scent of a rose bush still growing in Gustav Klimt’s last studio garden in Vienna — the very one he painted in 1912. A Viennese one-woman house, founded in 2018, on the border of science and art.