The ideals of harmony and balance are what guide our hands at Sfumato, and it plays out in everything we do, from using natural ingredients to how our logo represents our creations.
Drawing a graph of scent intensity versus time, we can plot how an individual fragrance ingredient will be perceived after it is sprayed. At first we smell nothing, then the intensity picks up, peaks, and eventually decreases. Representing this evolution as a Gaussian curve (an ideal bell curve) is very pleasing mathematically. Gaussians describe many fascinating phenomena, from the approximate outcome of Plinko to the light intensity of laser pulses, and are one of the most beautiful mathematical objects known.
But Gaussians only describe one part of the scent, and we seek harmony between all the pieces. The ancient Greeks thought the Golden Ratio was the perfect proportion for beauty. They found it in the human body, the natural world, and geometric figures like the Golden Rectangle and Golden Spiral. And since beauty is often irrational, it is fitting that the ratio is described by a number that cannot be captured exactly, only approximated.
Although not traditionally applied to crafting fragrances, harmony among Gaussians can be sought between the most quickly evaporating components, the heaviest ingredients, and the ones in between, and it is from the interplay of this unfolding that we derived our logo. Incorporating these ideals into the Gaussian progression, we made the peak heights and centers related by the golden ratio, creating five levels of golden ratio.
Passed down for millennia, this is the formula for beauty.