Arushi Agrawal

“When I was a child I used to go outside after it had rained and wished that I could capture that smell and keep it forever,” Arushi Agrawal  says. It was this childhood wish that inspired her to start with her Talent Pressure Cooker project of 2016, The Essence of Rain.

Smelling the monsoon. Cities, countries… They all smell different. In India, where Arushi’s roots lie, the scent after rain is intense and amazing. “In The Netherlands it rains very frequently, whereas in India we have very dry periods. Just before the monsoon you can smell the coming rain in the air. You can feel the dampness, the heaviness. The air is damp and the bacteria in the soil are already producing a chemical reaction and you can smell that the rain is about to come.”

The fresh earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil is called Petrichor, Arushi explains. “The smell is produced by a soil bacteria called Streptomyces, that produces a chemical called geosmin which is the source of that scent. It’s my favorite smell and I have never met anyone who does not like that smell.” For the Talent Pressure Cooker Arushi Agrawal  designed a research project to capture the smell of rain and made a whole range of different rain perfumes. She did so by culturing soil samples in different buffers, dilutions and on different media to have optimum and selective growth of bacteria of the Streptomyces genus. Then, Arushi designed a pump to harvest and infuse the smell into the constructed perfumes.

Her final product was exhibited during our Dutch Design Week exposition The Essence of Things for the public to see – and, of course, to smell!