You can delete a photograph, lose a message thread, even forget the precise shape of someone’s face. Then you walk past a stranger wearing the right perfume and an entire period of your life returns without asking permission.

Scent has always had a potent ability to operate like a shortcut within memory. A few familiar notes can pull us backwards before we have worked out what we are smelling or why it matters. The effect is so culturally familiar that we barely question it, even though most of us would struggle to explain the smell of a memory when asked.

Index , a new London fragrance house founded by perfumer and fashion designer Isabella Smith and artist and creative technologist Tigris Li , is attempting to reverse that process. Instead of waiting for a scent to unlock a memory, it asks you to begin with the memory itself. You describe a moment from your life to a conversational installation, answer the questions it asks in response, then wait as your story is translated into a bespoke fragrance.

What began as an art installation is now becoming a direct-to-consumer business. Index will open a public pop-up at 92 Columbia Road in London, from 17th to 20th September 2026 , allowing visitors to leave with a 6ml perfume created from a memory they have chosen to revisit. The obvious question is what that memory will smell like. And if the fragrance becomes something you wear repeatedly, can it create a new route back to the story that produced it?

YouTube short - intro to Index

Index Reverses The Proust Effect

The relationship between scent and autobiographical memory is more than literary mythology. Research comparing odour, visual and verbal cues has found smell particularly effective at eliciting rich autobiographical memories (the Proust Phenomenon). This makes Index’s process particularly compelling, because it moves in the opposite direction; the memory is the starting point (a person, a place, the fragments that have stayed with you), then through conversation, the fragrance is produced as a new physical output associated with an intangible story and the experience of creating it. “The memory shapes the fragrance," Smith tells me, "and then the fragrance becomes another way of returning to the memory.”

Index treats memory not as something fixed, but as something personal and continually reshaped through recollection. The resulting fragrance is an interpretation, formed from what you choose to share, the emotional weight given to different details and the olfactory language Smith has built into the system.

In this sense, the product sits somewhere between a perfume and a new memory-making ritual. You revisit the past through conversation, a scent is created in response, then every subsequent use places that scent into a new moment. It changes on the skin, travels with the wearer and accumulates associations of its own. Li describes this as transforming the form of a memory. “There’s something beautiful about giving a memory new meaning, transforming it into something that is tangible.”

Your Memory Shapes The Fragrance

Every Index experience starts with the same question: if you could relive one memory, what would it be? There is no menu of moods to select, no list of ingredients to rank and no expectation that you understand the language of perfumery. You begin with something you already know, although the conversation may reveal that you know it differently from how you first imagined.

The installation asks follow-up questions about the people, places, images and feelings within the memory, with each answer shaping what comes next. A story that begins with a first date might move towards the warmth of the night, the anticipation before arriving or the reluctance to leave. A childhood memory might be rooted in a room, a journey, a particular person or a detail that seemed insignificant until the system asked about it.

This is where Li’s experience as an artist and creative technologist was key, creating a system that moves a person through the conversation without making the exchange feel like a clinical assessment or an online questionnaire. Li says the intention was for it to feel closer to talking with a friend over coffee or a drink. The machine is deliberately visible as a machine, while the rhythm of the encounter encourages reflection.

Behind the conversation, AI analyses the emotional foundations and contextual details of the story. It then connects those signals to Smith’s fragrance architecture, selecting components and calculating their proportions before the machine dispenses the final blend. The system has boundaries, working with categories, authored scent relationships and a defined fragrance library; it is not inventing a perfume from an unlimited universe of ingredients. Li describes the technology as a bridge that connects what the customer shares with the structure the pair have created.

Smith’s positioning is even more concise: “It’s a fragrance house that uses technology to facilitate the fragrance.” Li added, “Technology is just the medium.”

The AI makes the conversation and real-time interpretation possible, but the value of the experience still rests on two human contributions: the story brought by the customer and the perfumery developed by Smith. The machine has no meaningful output until someone sits in front of it. As Smith explains, “We’re building something new from it, something that couldn’t exist without them sitting there, telling it to us.”

Creating Bespoke Perfumes That Represent Memories

Emotional resonance can make an experience memorable, but it cannot rescue an unwearable fragrance. Index customers do not smell a line of finished perfumes before choosing one; they commit to the process and encounter the result only at the end, making formulation more of a creative partner than a final step. Smith has constructed a library of nine fragrance components, each containing approximately 35 to 65 ingredients. They are designed to be distinct enough to express different aspects of a story, while sharing materials that allow them to blend coherently across varying proportions. Index says the current architecture can produce more than 200,000 possible combinations.

Although the number makes for an impressive headline, the key factor is the relationships between the components. “When you add one plus one, it doesn’t always equal two,” Smith says. “It can equal five. It can equal minus three. You don’t necessarily know precisely what you’re going to get.”

Smith has included recognisable notes such as yuzu alongside more conceptual ones, including lipstick and even electricity (which carries a metallic quality that she associates with the jolt of adrenaline). These details give the library texture without turning every result into an olfactory experiment that is difficult to wear. “Because with our concept, you can’t choose the perfume,” she explains. “The perfumes do have to have an aspect of appeal to a lot of people.”

Her fashion background informs this approach. Smith trained at Central Saint Martins before working across couture and ready-to-wear at Maison Margiela and Givenchy. She sees both clothing and fragrance through the language of structure: the internal construction that allows particular materials, shapes or elements to work together. “You need to create the right structure to hold up the correct notes and the correct scent profile,” she says.

There is also a more instinctive link between the two disciplines; clothes and fragrance sit on the body, travel into social space and shape how a wearer feels about themselves. “It’s how it makes you feel when you put on a garment,” Smith adds. “It’s how you feel when you spray a perfume, and it’s the same thing.”

Personalisation in luxury has often meant adjusting a product after its essential design has been decided: initials on leather, a selected colourway or a choice from a menu of notes. Here, the customer’s story enters earlier and becomes part of the product’s planning phase, making the product personal in a way that is difficult to reproduce through conventional customisation alone.

A 6ml Bottle Can Carry A Lot Of Weight

Li understood the potential emotional weight of this process through a former participant. A woman who had experienced an earlier version of the installation later made a video explaining that her chosen memory concerned her mother, who had died when she was younger. According to Li, she sprayed the fragrance whenever she missed her. The story moved Li, but it also exposed a problem, as the original installation deleted each formula once each scent had been dispensed. As the participant watched the level in her bottle fall, Index had no record from which to recreate it.

Anyone who has rationed the remains of a discontinued perfume, or kept a near-empty bottle because it belonged to someone, will understand how an ordinary consumer object can become emotionally irreplaceable. The scarcity is no longer manufactured by a brand; it comes from the fear of losing access to what the object represents.

Index has changed its system accordingly; the fragrance formula and a summary of the memory are now attached to the customer’s private account, with the option to delete them. Li says the actual conversation is not retained, but customers can choose whether to add an anonymised version of their story to a public archive, organised around themes such as love, friendship, joy and longing. The founders also plan to allow customers to reorder their scent, first as another 6ml bottle and later in larger formats, giving the business a credible route from one-off experience to continuing relationship. Customers can return to make a fragrance from another memory, replenish the one they have or simply keep the formula as part of a personal archive.

The founders are asking people to place a different kind of trust in a fragrance house, based as much on how it handles their stories as how it formulates their perfume. Index’s approach gives customers control over whether their memory remains private or joins the wider collection, which also reveals the tension at the heart of the business: the product becomes powerful because it is personal, while the company needs a system capable of serving many people without flattening that individuality.

From Art Installation To A Fragrance You Can Buy

Index began with Emotional Alchemy, an installation Li created for an immersive Converse event alongside London Fashion Week in 2024. The project later appeared through commissions from Google, YouTube and Replit, evolving into a portable machine that could travel between locations, with each event allowing Li to observe how people behaved before, during and after the experience. Participants began asking whether they could do it again, purchase it as a gift or access it outside a commissioned event; Smith and Li founded Index in 2025 to build a fragrance house around that demand. The Columbia Road pop-up will test whether an installation developed for art, fashion and technology events can now become a viable consumer experience.

Smith believes customers are buying both a physical product and the opportunity to tell the story that creates it. “I think it’s quite cathartic often to do that,” she says, “and to have a product that feels really connected to that experience.” The public setting may add another layer; Li says that after using the installation, people often begin smelling one another’s perfumes and sharing the memories behind them, including with strangers. Her observation is that scent requires proximity; to experience another person’s fragrance, you have to enter their physical space. “That is a type of intimacy on its own,” she adds.

This is a particularly timely proposition for retail, as fashion and beauty stores have spent years adding screens, recommendation tools and increasingly frictionless routes to purchase. However, Index uses sophisticated technology to slow the customer down, ask them to speak and give them a reason to interact with the people around them.

The founders plan to take Index to other cities and aim to introduce an online version by Christmas, allowing customers to complete the experience remotely and receive the perfume by post. This expansion will test whether the emotional quality of the encounter can survive outside the physical installation; but, for now, the Columbia Road pop-up offers the fullest version: memory, conversation and formulation happening in the same place.

A Past Memory Lives In The Present

Index arrives at an interesting point in the development of consumer AI, with many of the most visible applications promising speed, productivity or a near-infinite supply of generated content . This machine asks for time, introspection and a story only one person can provide.

Index must now prove that its compelling experience can produce consistently good perfumes, repeat customers and that an intimate data exchange can retain trust as the company grows; especially when Index moves beyond invited events and begins serving the public directly. Yet the central idea already feels quite complete, since scent has always turned physical material into something difficult to hold onto. It appears, changes on the skin, enters a room and disappears, behaving in much the same way as memory.

Index brings the two together through a process that begins with recollection and ends with an object. The experience gives the fragrance its first meaning, but what happens next belongs to the wearer: where they take it, when they reach for it and which new moments become attached to the smell.

The question visitors will have to answer sounds simple enough, “If you could relive one memory, what would it be?” The key question for Index comes once customers have the bottle in their hand: how often will they choose to return? The 6ml bottle is the object that carries the encounter out into the world; it can be worn privately, shared with someone close enough to smell it or used as the beginning of another conversation. In Li’s words, “some memories deserve more than to be kept within.”