Sniffing Success

A scent ‘architect’, Chalida Kunalai has designed everything from hotel ambience to colours for the blind.

Words: Khetsirin Pholdhampalit
Photos: Suwit Kittitien

Chalida Kunalai has been sniffing out opportunities all her working life. The professional scent designer has created pleasant fragrances for consumer products – like rose-smelling laundry detergent and green tea-scented dishwashing liquid – as well as the bad smells of a gas leak, burning and sour milk to warn blind people about dangers.

“Our sense of smell is a human instinct and is closely linked with memory and experience. a whiff of cologne in a department store can remind you of an ex-boyfriend who wore the same scent,” grinds Chalida, who has been in the scent business for 30 years. “Fragrance can also add a layer to your personal identify, like invisible clothing. That’s why we use the phrase ‘wear perfume’. Smell is thus a powerful and creative form of communication related to emotion and experience.”

Chalida, who looks far younger than her 50 years, got her first sniff of the scent business three decades ago when she landed a job as an account executive for a perfume house. The role taught her plenty about the art of fragrance.

“A scent designer works closely with a perfumer. I am the ‘architect’ who creates plans that are used to make something, while a perfumer is the engineer who takes those plans and makes them practical and usable,” says Chalida, who graduated in political science and mass communication.

After working in the perfume house for 10 years, she moved on to designing fragrances for Asian consumer products – a role she has filled for the past 20 years. Her task is a challenging one: to create scents that can be infused in goods that will appeal to different lifestyles and cultures of countries across Asia.

“For instance, Chinese food normally doesn’t have strong flavours, so Chinese people prefer light and natural odours to strong-smelling scents. On the contrary, we can’t use light, pleasant odours for goods sold in India because Indians have noses that are familiar with intense spices. Thai people, meanwhile, like floral and fruity scents such as lavender and apple,” says Chalida, whose nose was “educated” at courses on perfume she took in France during which she learned more about sensory perception and the raw materials of fragrances.

Apart from her everyday work designing fragrances for consumer products, Chalida loves to experiment and try new things. She has created chocolate-scented oil for wine and edible pepper-smelling oil to flavour Western dishes for a restaurant and wine bar.

“Wine and perfume speak the same language – both have fruity, spicy and light – or full-bodied characteristics. Most people love both wine and chocolate, so I experimented and combined them to make a signature drink. It received a lot of positive feedback from customers. Meanwhile, some people like peppery smells but not spicy tastes. So I realised an edible pepper-smelling oil that can be infused in the food could meet that need,” she says.

Chalida also designed the scented ambience for a luxury hotel, after being instructed to deliver the key messages of “sophisticated”, “luxury”, “innovative” and “avid traveller”.

“Using a set of fragrant oils, my task is to combine this and that to discover the right scent that communicates those key messages to the hotel’s clients. It is similar to an artist who has to create a painting from a palette of available colours,” she says.

Her deep knowledge of scent design also landed Chalida a place among the speakers at 2015 TEDxBangkok. The forum for innovative thinkers gave her opportunities to integrate her expertise with masters in various fields – from scientists, tech artists and therapists to performers, storytellers and children’s book writers.

In 2016, Chalida collaborated with brain scientist Assoc. Prof Yodchanan Wongsawat, from Mahidol University’s Biomedical Engineering Department, to create a conceptual art installation titled “Brain Smells” aimed at visualising how the brain is stimulated by various smells.

She designed three scents to evoke different emotions and experiences. One scent evoked nature with an odour of grass, while the others recalled candy and the smell of burning. Electrodes were attached to the heads of participants and connected up to a computer. When the prepared scents were inhaled by participants and processed in the brain, the computer recorded the brainwave frequencies and interpreted them as emotions. It then assigned a separate colour for each emotion, drops of which were directed onto pools of white milk serving as a liquid canvas.

“Blue was associated with nature and relaxation [the grass scent], while yellow represented childhood memory [candy]. Red reflected an alert and focused state of mind [burning]. These colours were real-time visual representations of the brain’s processing of information. The results varied, depending on each subject’s memory and experience of the scent. We aimed to present, visually, how smells have an influence on the human brain – and open up ways this could be applied in various fields such as healthcare, education, art and design,” she explains.