Most Bus Pirates have a scratch and sniff sticker! Rub the sticker and it should invoke themes of soldering (well, ozone) and freshly painted factory floors in that very specific green color. The sticker people have a list of scents (coffee, cherry, etc), but we wanted custom!
After a scent workshop at @mediamatic I set about making the bus pirate 5 scent with raw perfumery molecules. We ordered production materials from a company in Shanghai that promised to mix the formula. They didn’t, and just sent the individual components, but the sticker factory was willing to do the mixing for us.
There was a little misunderstanding - they need “pure oil”, which I understood as undiluted molecules. Instead, they need a thick oily consistency. Caprylic capric triglyceride, common in cosmetics, thickened it enough for the encapsulation process.
The microencapsulated scent is then glued to the stickers. 120g of scent material is enough to coat 20k stickers. I asked about doing hologram scratch and sniff, but the factory said that the scent material usually etches holographic foil. Is your Bus Pirate 5 genuine? Just perform a GCMS analysis of the sticker to find out!
C’mon! These stickers are so addictive! It smells like my life! I appreciate the small details and im certain many others do as well! I need the recipe.
I’m glad you got one and enjoyed it! I sent a full set with the cases I mailed you too
The formula will be in the next docs update. The ozone is Floralozone. The classy (factory floor) smell is ethylene brassylate - it was a “captive” molecule (secret molecule only made by one manufacturer) for years and is the main ingredient in many many famous fragrances. It’s all held together with ISO E super, another captive that only recently became public, you’d know it instantly as a component of Cool Water and anything that smells like “blue” men’s products from the 90s to the 10s.
I had a much more complex formulation, but I couldn’t actually source all the molecules in China. It ended up stripped down, but it was on budget and on time
Kevin Bates (Arduboy) asked about making an air freshener on twitter. I think it would be funny to make an air freshener with terrasol. It is extremely strong and smells like wet dirt stuck to root vegetables pulled from a garden after rain. It is a really uncanny how much it smells like dirt and how strong it is, I actually diluted it down a bit with pure alcohol and wore it to some events.
A scratch and sniff “genuine” sticker seals every Bus Pirate anti-static bag. The custom scent evokes fresh green paint on factory floors, PVC plastics, and oily/diesel notes. After a year the supply is almost gone. Should we keep doing this? Did you know about it and/or smell it?
I think it is a fun and unique quirk! While I wouldn’t recommend these accents for a random other enterprise, your story of how you created the accents is awesome and helps make your business feel… [[ personable(?)… Non-mega-chain(?)… Connection(?)… Can’t find the adjective…]]
I definitely sniffed them.
If keeping them: Maybe add a little slip of paper with the story of how you choose the scents? Think of it as a brand-building thing, if you want to embrace the quirkiness into your branding?
