OlfactionaryA real NASA-fragrance industry collaboration
On October 29, 1998, a miniature rose called 'Overnight Scentsation' launched aboard Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-95, as part of an experiment run in partnership with International Flavors & Fragrances. The goal was to find out what happens to a flower's essential-oil production without gravity holding those oils in place within the stem.
Sampled in orbit, four separate times
Astronauts collected the rose's scent using a hair-thin silicon fiber coated with a molecule-trapping liquid, sampling the flower four separate times over the course of the mission. Each sample came back different, and collectively, they showed the rose producing a genuinely different essential-oil profile than the same variety grown on Earth.
It's in a real bottle you can buy
IFF turned the space-grown scent data into a new fragrance material, which was worked into Shiseido's Zen, a fragrance built around floral, woody, and what the brand describes as "spiritual" facets, making it one of the very few consumer products anywhere containing a note whose origin traces back to an actual spaceflight experiment.