Welcome to a sensory revolution! A menu with curry, lemongrass, figs and sesame cream enters our daily beauty routine and our scented cleansing rituals may change forever.
By Silvia Manzoni. Cover image: Agua de Tomate, a flavourful water is obtained from home-grown, sun-drenched tomatoes, and then infused with aromatic leaves of basil, is the base for the Tomato Experience fragrance. Courtesy La Boscana.
When a top-end chef’s recipes inspire perfumers, shower gels and shampoos can add a new sensory experience to our daily beauty rituals, making a morning shower a chic, gourmet moment.
After the pandemic, exploring new sensory experiences is at the heart of beauty research. We entered the age of synesthesia and multi-sensoriality, and the results can be truly astonishing, a surprising dialogue between chic and pop.
The chef’s menu? Today, it is not only available at fine-dining tables, but also in perfumes, shower gels and shampoos for a unique sensory experience inviting users to discover new aromas.
As we know, taste and smell are two very close senses, and in recent years, many experiments have attempted to reveal new aspects of this relationship. But here we are exploring new ground: getting the recipes of an upscale restaurant into everyday self-care products.
HOW A MICHELIN-STARRED CHEF RECIPE ENTERS THE SHOWER
The team of perfumers from Catalan company Eurofragance worked with the Spanish Chef Joël Castanyé, founder of the Michelin-starred restaurant La Boscana in Lerida, to find original olfactory outlets for a range of shower gels, hand creams and shampoos aimed for the general public.
These products fragrances feature ingredients from the recipes of the restaurant’s top-end menu, an incredible journey through taste and smell with four first courses, four-second courses and three desserts, served in small portions like tapas.
A NEW SENSORY VISION
“This is a completely new project”, explains Stéphanie Marze, Head of Global Corporate Communication. “The fragrances inspired by Joël’s creative cuisine stimulate sensory pleasures and add refinement to the products”. But the chef has also found new inspirations by exchanging ideas with perfumer makers, who opened up unprecedented taste and olfactory paths to him. “It is a kind of magic to see how two seemingly distant worlds manage to complement each other and share the same values,” adds Joël Castanyé.
CUISINE AND FRAGRANCES
Perfumer Soïzic Beaucourt, who created the fragrance of the revitalising shower gel, described her amazing experience. “Chef Joël proposed surprising combinations such as orange and curry for a sweet-and-sour dish seasoned with coconut milk, ginger and lemongrass, which I would have never considered combining in a scent”. Figs cooked in the traditional Korean Ocoo pressure cooker and paired with sesame inspired her ‘colleague’
Angéline Leporini to develop a shampoo’s evocative smell. “The dish revealed tobacco aromas, grilled notes, sweetened by the sesame cream, which immediately inspired me”.
A daring mix of aromas invites evasion and shows how taste can pave the way for a new olfactory experience. And, of course, vice versa. Welcome to a unique starred gourmet shower experience!
Silvia Manzoni is a Journalist and Beauty Expert.
