Chanel

There are few liquids on Earth that cost more than printer ink. In fact, at a cost of $4,285 per liter, it’s almost double the cost of even the most expensive perfumes. Put that way, there are few people on Earth who would argue that printer ink is actually worth that much, yet that is what the vast majority of us pay, ounce by ounce, and cent by cent. As a way of highlighting the absurd cost of printer ink, Australian artist Celeste Watson has subversively redesigned the packaging of Hewlett Packard printing ink to resemble Chanel No. 5. advertisement advertisement There’s a reason we live in an era of $40 computer printers: companies are making all of their money off the ink, and not even particularly honestly. They can afford to give the hardware away at cost to get you hooked. Even if you believe that printer ink is worth thousands per liter, the cartridge industry routinely pulls shady tricks such as building chips into their cartridges that report empty long … [Read more...] about Why Printer Ink Should Be Packaged Like Chanel No. 5

Once upon a time, perfume was a luxury only kings and queens could afford. The technology of fragrance originally involved crushing up flowers, until the French perfected the technique of extracting and concentrating essential oils from plants instead. Later, chemists came along who could whip up a recipe for a fragrance in a lab, giving us the mass-produced scents that the proletariat know and love. advertisement advertisement But, alas, a rose is still a rose. To this day, no scientists or perfumers have been able to reproduce the complex and subtle scent notes of natural rose oil, which is, after all, the product of millions of years of evolution and hundreds of individual compounds. Many high-end fragrance brands still use natural rose oil in their products, but are increasingly faced with supply shortages, due to crop failures, natural disasters, and war-related instability (1,000 rose buds reportedly go into making the smallest bottle of Chanel No.5). Few know this … [Read more...] about The Quest To Reproduce The Scent Of A Rose, With Designer Microbes