In a glass vial in Boston, a vanished world blooms again.
Its contents, light and fragrant, are nothing more than a few molecules suspended in alcohol. But inhale — and for a fleeting moment, the past returns. The crisp scent of a long-lost Indian flower. The sweetness of a Hawaiian hibiscus that vanished over a century ago. The grassy hush of an extinct American prairie.
These scents, now bottled by a new biotech perfume brand called Future Society, never touched the noses of anyone alive today — until now. They are the reconstructed fragrances of extinct flowers, revived from dried herbarium specimens through DNA sequencing, synthetic biology, and the work of master perfumers.
And they are not just perfumes. They are, as the company puts it, “scent-surrections.”
From Herbarium to Atomizer
The project began, as many ambitious ideas do, with a simple question: What if we could smell the past?
At Harvard’s Herbarium, more than five million specimens of algae, fungi, and plants rest in cabinets that stretch back generations. In 2016, Christina Agapakis, a synthetic biologist and creative director at the Boston biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks, began taking samples from several extinct flowers — some last seen over 100 years ago. Among them was Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a Hawaiian hibiscus-relative last recorded in 1912 before ranching and deforestation wiped it from the southern slopes of Maui.
Scientists extracted DNA from these dried blossoms, searching for the genes responsible for the enzymes that create scent molecules — nature’s aromatic calling cards used to attract pollinators. These genes were then synthesized and inserted into yeast cells, which began to churn out the same or very similar scent molecules.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that these perfumes smell exactly like their extinct flowers they’re supposed to mimic. For one, it would be impossible to know for sure. And secondly, flowers are darn complex.
Part Science, Part Storytelling
“We’re never actually going to know what these flowers smelled like,” said Jasmina Aganovic, the MIT-trained founder of Future Society. “This is just a starting piece of data . . . It’s not going to be able to tell us everything, but maybe one day it will.”
Instead of seeking total scent accuracy, Aganovic and her collaborators embraced interpretation. Working with renowned perfumers, they transformed genetic clues into olfactory stories.
Six scents now make up Future Society’s debut line. Each is tied to a specific extinct plant — and each tells one of these stories.
Floating Forest evokes the lush canopy of Shorea cuspidata, a towering Bornean tree lost to logging. Invisible Woods reimagines Wendlandia angustifolia, a delicate white-flowered tree from India’s Western Ghats, likely driven to extinction by drought. Grassland Opera is a musky, green tribute to Orbexilum stipulatum, a flower of the American plains, last seen in 1812.
The process is part science, part storytelling, and part elegy. “With plants that are from another time, never before have we been able to time travel through smell,” said Aganovic. “But now we can do that, thanks specifically to DNA sequencing.”
A New Use for Old Science
According to neuroscientist Karina Del Punta, roughly 75% of daily emotions are shaped by smell. And unlike language or sight, scent bypasses our cultural filters, going straight to the brain’s emotional centers.
“Reconstructed scents of extinct flowers are not just olfactory curiosities — they’re emotional bridges between what has been lost and what still might be saved,” Del Punta told Atmos. “They can transform extinction from an abstract concept into an intimate, embodied experience.”
This emotional dimension is key to the project’s ambition: reframing climate grief as climate engagement. “We talk about the future as if it’s already destined to be apocalyptic,” said Aganovic. “But the future hasn’t been written.”
Instead of glamorizing extinction, Future Society’s fragrances attempt to honor what’s gone — and build momentum for what can still be protected. “We can’t bring the flowers back. We can’t science our way out of all of our problems,” said Aganovic. “But we can think about how science enables us to do things that we weren’t able to before.”
Reinventing Sustainability Through Biotechnology
Future Society’s fragrances are also a proof-of-concept for something bigger: the power of biotech to revolutionize sustainable product design.
Traditional perfume production relies on vast fields of flowers, thousands of which are stripped from the soil to make just a kilo of oil. In contrast, the biotech approach uses yeast to produce scent molecules with pinpoint precision — no farming, no fertilizers, and far less waste.
“Through advances like DNA sequencing, we now have access to nature’s instruction manual,” said Aganovic. “That means we no longer need to extract plants from the Earth or disrupt nature.”
This vision is shared by Ginkgo Bioworks. Ginkgo’s co-founder Jason Kelly first proposed reviving the smell of an extinct flower nearly a decade ago.
What began as a speculative project blossomed into an immersive art installation called Resurrecting the Sublime, developed with artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and scent expert Sissel Tolaas. The experience used scent diffusion and soundscape to ask not just what a flower once smelled like — but how it made the world feel.
Now, that same spirit lives on your skin.
Between Jurassic Park and Chanel No. 5
Despite the comparisons to Jurassic Park, Aganovic is careful to draw a line. These aren’t cloned, resurrected plants. They’re artistic reimaginings, rooted in data but elevated by emotion.
Each Future Society scent is an act of speculative reconstruction, similar to how paleoartists render extinct creatures from fossils and guesswork. “The science is the inspiration and starting point, but artistic interpretation can take this in whatever direction,” Aganovic told Forbes. “This is not how creative briefs are developed — they had never seen one like this.”
In doing so, the brand redefines both what perfume can be and what science can do. “How we talk about science is a little bit different,” Aganovic added. “I have come to view science as craftsmanship.”
And in that craftsmanship, she sees a way forward — not just for fragrance, but for our collective imagination.
“What is actually going to rise to the occasion of the industry, and the best version of the future that we want to see?” she asked. “We’re using science as a creative tool, rather than a performance driver.”
