It's 2021 and we had just flown into the sky with petri dishes and brought it back to our lab to see what would grow. We were worried we wouldn’t find anything, but it was the opposite. Something did start growing, really fast.

And fast growth, especially from an unknown environment, can mean contamination or something potentially unsafe. So, lab safety told us to destroy it. And we did. 

This was a big deal because you want to preserve a living archive that you can go back to and validate, replicate, or perform future experiments on. I would say that having to destroy this was sort of poetic, just reinforcing the impossibility of capturing something as ephemeral as the clouds. 

But before they were destroyed, we were able to preserve the genetic material for DNA sequencing, so that we could at least understand what microbes we found and the scent molecules that they could create, and that was enough to keep the project going. 

We used something called DNA Sequencing to identify the types of microbes that live up in the clouds, but also the types of scent molecules, that they have the genes for.

By 2022, and we finally can see what we found up there - its 13 unique microbes, and after another year plus of work, we were able to decode their genomes to see that they had the capability to make 57 different scent molecules.

Among the microbes are: Bacillus sp., Duganella sp., Pantoea sp., Pedobacter sp., Rhodococcus sp., Pseudomonas sp., Lysinibacillus sp., Stenotrophomonas sp., and Moraxella sp. All uniquely adapted to the extreme environment of the clouds. 

Spirituality and microbiology are two things I didn’t expect to come together, but here we are. What give me chills was that the olfactive profiles are not entirely surprising. Within the genomes of the microbes, we found the ability to produce aldehydes, some sweet compounds, and some floral-esque metabolites.  It included things like:

• Acetophenone (often used to create a powdery, sweet note)
• Benzaldehyde (almond, nutty, vanillic)
• Phenylacetaldehyde (honey-like, sweet, but also grassy)
• Cresol (florals like narcissus, jasmine, tuberose)
• Indole (found in white flowers)
• 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxy-benzaldehyde (vanilla! actually!)

The picture that emerges is one that is light, airy and soft. Slightly sweet. But certainly not smoky, not heavy. Or citrusy. 

It made me wonder: How is it that even if we’ve never smelled the clouds, we still somehow recognize them? Like we are more connected to the world around us than we realize intuitively or subconsciously.

In the hands of master perfumer Daniela Andrier, an aesthetic interpretation of the clouds was brought to life in the form of a fine fragrance. She chose notes of sparking aldehydes, fluffy vanilla, aquatic blooms, oceanic fucus, iris, and a base of musks. The fragrance is remarkably airy and light, with a hint of sweetness. It cocoons you throughout the day, shifting with you. It's sophisticated and addictive. Impossible to overdo.

- Jasmina, Founder