VivaScentz, Givaudan’s new creation tool to boost consumers’ wellbeing

Bettina Aykroyd

13 July 2020

VivaScentz, Givaudan's new creation tool to boost consumers' wellbeing

Health and well-being have never been more important in current times. While the interest shown by scientists in the power of fragrances is recent, Givaudan, for its part, has been focusing on the subject for 30 years now, and intends to become the leader in sensory innovation. Today, the Group is launching VivaScentz, a support tool to help perfumers in crafting fragrances with well-being benefits. What will be the new face of tomorrow’s perfumes?

Surfing the wellness trend

The importance of the attitude people adopt in the face of the vagaries of life has long been highlighted by philosophers and psychologists. We know that positive emotions have an impact, both on our state of mind, our body and our moods. And the current success of books on personal development, on practices like yoga or meditation, show the importance f customer expectations in this area. Expectations that perfume, through its ability to trigger good emotions, could partly satisfy.

On this premise, the Givaudan teams have developed a new technology, to help perfumers in creating more easily fragrances with real well-being benefits, but also hygiene, household and oral hygiene products.

VivaScentz thus offers brands possibilities to foster a strong connection between fragrances and well-being. In a nutshell, consumers will have in one product, a quality fragrance along with beneficial powers.

This new technology complements Givaudan’s already existing offers in terms of sensory innovation, such as DreamScentz, a technology that improves sleep. It is on this basis that the Unilever brand, Radox, has launched two shower gels, one with a lavender and Ylang Ylang scent, the other with a chamomile and white valerian scent, with the mention DreamScentz on the packaging.

A science-backed technology

The technology was developed in Givaudan’s Health and Well-being Centre of Excellence in Ashford. This center focuses on three areas, namely, bad odours, neuroscience and oral hygiene.

VivaScentz will have required more than 30 years of multidisciplinary research and innovation. This interconnection between fragrances and well-being is backed on scientific evidence and the Centre has been collaborating closely with a renowned research academic partner, to develop a metric that measures overall well-being, covering the psychological, physiological and social dimensions in a fragrance context. In addition, the centre’s team of neuroscientists works in a concerted manner with the team of perfumers during the creative process to trigger a feeling of well-being.

In total, more than 2,000 consumer tests have demonstrated that fragrances created with the VivaScentz technology have a positive impact on the user’s overall state of well-being. It appears that 89% of consumers from the study, estimated that fragrances, flavours, oral hygiene products could improve their quality of life, and help them adopt a more positive attitude in their everyday lives. Could this be the opening of a new chapter in fragrance creation?