Béton Armé

Distilling taste into matter

Fragrance produced in Grasse, by Galimard.
 

Béton Armé is an experiment in using AI to make personal codes and taste materially legible. A visual system of references was translated into sensory language, structured through the logic of perfumery, calibrated against known fragrance coordinates, and composed in Grasse as a 100ml formula. The result is both a perfume and a method: a way to move from image to ingredient, from instinct to structure, from taste to matter. It was also serves as an example of my fundamental belief that Ai should not be used for generatinng but rather for distilling and translating. In this case, it translated the architecture of my taste system into language a perfumer could build from.

The question:

Can a personal taste system be translated into matter?

Not generated, translated. Generation asks AI to invent from nothing. Translation asks AI to remain faithful to something that already has structure. This difference is key to my creative process. It requires knowing your own system well enough to specify what fidelity looks like before you have the result. Preferences produce generic outputs. Systems produce specific ones. The question was whether this taste system was rigorous enough to survive crossing a medium it had never occupied.

The input / 74 images

A moodboard built with images chosen for the physical and atmospheric qualities they carry: temperature, texture, weight, volatility and not for what they depict. Organised into five sensory clusters before any AI interaction.

The translation

Images were uploaded in batches and interrogated for what physical and emotional qualities they carried. Each image was asked to yield: a dominant sensation, a time quality (volatile or enduring), a material register, and what it explicitly was not. The subtractive answers mattered as much as the additive ones. The resulting vocabulary was clustered by volatility : how quickly or slowly each quality would arrive and depart if it were a smell, then translated into olfactory descriptors: not ingredient names, but phrases a nose would use. From those descriptors, three structurally distinct compositions were generated.

Three structural proposals emerged: Concrete Citrus, Ginger Ash, Citrus Monastery. Each a different reading of the same aesthetic, but genuinely distinct in its structural interpretation

Concept 01 rhymed with the abstraction of CdG. The final composition would need to hold both abstraction and freshness and shed the sweetness from each.

Concept 02 was discarded, the notes were contradictory and leaned into the wrong materials. 

Concept 03 carried the incense register of Astier without its warmth and lacked the brutalism.

Elements from the remaining 01 and 02 were brought into dialogue with Galimard for dosage and balance.

The human judgment

Two reference perfumes were used as known coordinates to help me calibrate between top/heart and base. The question was not which proposal replicated closest their recipe, but rather about the perfume logic and layered storytelling.
I looked at which proposal was consistent with the logic that produces an emotional response similar to the referencest.

The final prototype is a layered transition between organic and metallic.

BÉTON ARMÉ opens with green bergamot, mandarin, and anise, a citrus stripped of juice and sweetness until it becomes almost anatomical. The heart moves through neroli, pine, aldehydes, fig, and linden like a strange passage between cold light and living skin. The base holds: vetiver, Bavarian moss, white musk, opoponax, and ebony cedar. Dry, mineral, resinous, and persistent. Reinforced concrete, but with heat inside it.

The object - early bottle design exploration

BÉTON ARMÉ. Reinforced concrete: the structural material in which steel rebar is cast inside stone to make both stronger than either would be alone. The name is both brutalist and playful, as I thrive at the intersection of contrasting notions, like the notes of the fragrance itslef. It describes the material, the method, and the result simultaneously.

The perfume exists. It holds. It is faithful to the aesthetic it came from, because that aesthetic was rigorous enough to survive translation into a medium it had never occupied.