"Today, the body is undoubtedly the newest site to be perfected"

December 25, 2012 3:05 PM

edible frags and human atomisers

Swallowable perfume—! Is this the logical outcome of precarity, atomisation and hyper-individualism—to reassert yourself, now, as a human atomiser? The vagaries of genetic difference and skin chemistry now allow you, as the ad breathily encourages, to “Go beyond accessory. Express uniqueness. Swallowable perfume: a new cycle of evolution.” Only five years after the Lululemon sweatable perfume hoax debuted, it has already become reality.

posted by the man of twists and turns (16 comments total)

That little video thing is really repulsive, like scenes from a rendering plant. It took me quite a while to identify the scrawny body part in the left hand still image.
posted by thylacinthine at 3:12 PM on December 25, 2012

Oh you just know this all ends in zombies
posted by TwelveTwo at 3:23 PM on December 25, 2012

I can't explain why I am so disappointed that it's by "human atomiser" they don't mean butt.
posted by herrdoktor at 3:28 PM on December 25, 2012 [9 favorites]

That may be what happens when you combine it with an antiperspirant.
posted by TwelveTwo at 3:34 PM on December 25, 2012

B complex vitamins, in larger doses, will make you smell... yeasty. With considerable sillage. It's not the way one would usually strive to smell, but it does show the feasability of the mechanism.
posted by StickyCarpet at 3:42 PM on December 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

Maybe it is a set theory joke.
posted by TwelveTwo at 5:13 PM on December 25, 2012 [4 favorites]

...sweatable perfume

If I recall correctly, Benjamin Franklin proposed a drinkable elixir of flower oils that could be emitted as fartable perfume, so that no matter how loudly the spiders barked at a social event, everyone would come out smelling like roses.
posted by y2karl at 6:28 PM on December 25, 2012 [2 favorites]

Eating fenugreek seeds or drinking tea made from fenugreek seeds in sufficient quantities will give your sweat a pleasant maple syrup smell. And your urine, too, which is also nice.
posted by Auden at 8:10 PM on December 25, 2012 [4 favorites]

I wonder how this woul affect asthmatics? As it is, magazines with perfume ads, the perfume areas of department stores are very hard on Mr. Roquette. So is winter when our neighbors cook odiferous foods, and the smoke from our smokining neighbors doesn't get vented out.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:17 PM on December 25, 2012

Hellooo ladies, I've just eaten a heaping helping of asparagus, and let me tell you... ladies? Ladies? Where did they all go?
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:48 PM on December 25, 2012 [1 favorite]

I strongly disapprove.
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 PM on December 25, 2012

While the idea is super cool and seems feasible, there doesn't seem to be any information on this stuff other than the news flurry that the team's press release generated back in October of 2011. I downloaded the press release from the main website, Swallowableparfum, and what technical information is included makes me suspicious that this is indeed "already reality" as they claim.

Most of the information about the synthetic biologist on the project is in Italian. I can read a little bit of it but it's slow going. I did gather that the lab wants to design these lipids from "scratch," which makes me more deeply suspicious that this project will ever be more than a fancy website and a press release, at least as far as the FDA is concerned.

They are basically talking about synthesizing drugs and that is a fairly huge undertaking for anyone who is not already a pharmaceutical company. I was hoping that they were going to start a little smaller, with some known non-toxic compounds like the geraniol, a naturally occurring lipid, mentioned in the OP's link.
posted by sunnichka at 10:56 PM on December 25, 2012

Anyone care for some pineapple?
posted by nathancaswell at 6:43 AM on December 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

Dimethyl sulphoxide- DMSO- absolutely makes one reek of a combination of oysters and onions. It comes out in your sweat, in your breath, and anywhere else you can leak odors from. Would be particularly enticing to those who just love the smell of old mermaids.
posted by Phyllis Harmonic at 10:01 AM on December 26, 2012

mmmm oysters and mignonette
posted by nathancaswell at 11:04 AM on December 26, 2012

Eating fenugreek seeds or drinking tea made from fenugreek seeds in sufficient quantities will give your sweat a pleasant maple syrup smell. And your urine, too, which is also nice.

For x values of nice.
posted by Divine_Wino at 4:00 PM on December 26, 2012