Sound as an ingredient?: COSSMA

photo: ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com

Sensoriality is at the heart of beauty care, with a strong focus on texture and scent experiences. According to Helga Hertsig-Lavocah, we have forgotten sound - and it is sound that will revolutionise beauty care, home fragrance and even home care.

The revolution with sound as an ingredient has already started in chocolate. The American high end chocolate brand Vosges has launched a line called “Lab”. In the center of the pack front, consumers can read “infused with a healing sound frequency.” The brand explains that they use vibrations during the cooling process. Vosges has done this before; their Cosmic Truffles are treated with “piped in sounds with varying frequencies” taping into the healing properties of sound. If this sounds familiar, you’re right. The secret to the miracle broth at the heart of all Crème de la Mer products involves “light & sound energy … creating a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.” Similarly, LG Household and Healthcare’s prestige skin care brand “Su:m 37” claims its ingredients are fermented in oak barels for 1,102 days, with music played in the room. Another example of sound in the production process comes from an American supplements brand called Nambu, “Sound gives herbs life. Phoneme infused herbs were developed by spiritual scientists, made to revitalize mind and body, with one capsule... phonemes (are) the smallest unit of sound in a spoken word.” Beat Wampfler is a Swiss amateur cheese maker. He teamed up with Bern University of Arts to explore if playing music to cheese while it matures, would influence the taste – they concluded it did. Even though these examples come

from the niche markets, they do have mass appeal. Everyone links sound with healing (and sometimes even as a weapon). Music is often the first thing we turn to, to lift our moods. The Chinese character for medicine includes the character for music. Is this coincidence? So, while exam ples such as an American company called Sacred Springs selling kombucha “infused with sound and intention” may sound curious, it’s not implausible.

Sound shapes our lives

Art and design studio Burton Nitta (Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta) exhibited “New Organs of Creation” at the Science Gallery in London. One of the inspirations for this speculative art piece was “research (which) has shown that sound can help direct the eventual form of stem cells. For instance, low sound frequencies in the range of 50Hz to 100Hz can help coax stem cells into bone cells, instead of other forms such as heart or skin cells.” We’re only just starting to understand the power of sound as a medicine.

Is sound the new cold press?

More and more, brands are using ingredient back stories, their origin and processing journey, as the reason to believe (RTB) or the differentiator, particularly in skin care. Cold press is the buzz word that crept from smoothies over to beauty care – savvy consumers want cold pressed juices. Now we see this term slapped onto many mass market products with “cold pressed oils.” Sound could be the next big thing for the processing back story. Furtuna Skin is a high end natural beauty care brand from Italy, that touts the “Soundbath Extraction Method” as the key to the efficacy of their products. They bathe “the raw plant materials in sound waves. It’s a gentle extraction process that utilizes the power of sound to extricate the bioactives and nutrients at full potency. Because of its speedy extraction time, it doesn’t overprocess the plant materials. It doesn’t use high heat which can damage the ingredients. And it’s a green technology that results in a healthier, purer extraction and a cleaner product since no harsh solvents are used.”

The sound of luxury

We are all familiar with high end car brands and the difference in the sound quality of the indicators and the car door closing – all signalling a luxury, premium product. Tha automobile industry calls it “the audio footprint” – what about the audio footprint of opening or closing osmetic products? Researcher Ana Tajadura- Jimenez, University of Gothenburg, uses the term “emo-acoustics.” What are the “emo-acoustics” of your shower gel or shampoo? Are shower products experienced differently in a noisy room? How does it sound when I squeeze the bottle? What do I hear when I apply the product? Maybe all we’re doing is tapping into mindfulness – but it’s a starting point for new product development. We all know that dry skin sounds different from moisturised skin when touched; we can talk about the sound of skin health, not only its visual appearance. The sound of scratching, the sound of irritation. Even the word “soothe” in English is an audio balm. This could be a natural evolution of the ASMR trend.

Sound for personalisation

Design and technology studio Common Works is exploring how sound can be used to shape objects – as an alternative to traditional moulding, so that consumers can create products unique to them. Imagine the impact this could have on our categories. There’s so much to explore, so much excitement in the future of our categories.