Wellness Fragrances and the broadening of the pioneer programs to include plant and fragrance studies

Over the past few months, much has unfolded, and we’ve been excited to share it all with you.

Over the summer, we began a strategic partnership with the world’s largest private flavour and fragrance house and research facility. This collaboration aims to continue developing our plant formulations to the best standard using only natural extracts and, in parallel, to test and launch a range of wellness fragrances. These “functional” fragrances are curated to target specific emotions to help us feel better in our everyday lives.

By definition, wellness fragrances are scents specially formulated to stimulate the neural pathways associated with a specific behaviour or mood. One example may be smelling a Christmas tree candle and having that scent elicit powerful memories and emotions of home, or perhaps a spritz of lavender essential oil on a pillow to encourage sleep and calm.

As such, we know there is power in aroma’s profound immediacy of effect, and aromatic compounds are potentially the most underutilised yet potent tool in our wellness toolbox.

So what if we dared to imagine a world where functional wellness fragrances could better our lives in a scientifically measurable and material way?

What if, just like taking three sprays of valerian or passiflora each evening to improve our sleep, we could have a fragrance tailored to improve our focus? One that wakes us up, revitalising in the morning, boosts our energy midday whilst we work (helping reduce our reliance on caffeine or sugar), and helps us wind down at the end of a long day (perhaps a little lighter on the wine)?

While our sofi plant pod formulations for sleep and calm can provide noticeable benefits within 10+ days, they are there to do long-term work, offering adrenal support and gently promoting a return to homeostasis when dosed and consumed regularly.

On the other hand, wellness fragrances offer instantaneous moments of respite at different points throughout the day when changing our mood or how we feel for the better so we can make it through the day would be our primary concern.

The combination of these two highly complementary modes of delivery - a mouth spray to swallow for the plants and a fragrance spray to smell and feel - could hold the key to unlocking a brand new paradigm of natural relief, ultimately helping us improve how we feel.

SO…

Wellness fragrances will be available to Pioneers to test very soon, an opportunity which will allow us to play a vital role in furthering the frontier and promise of fragrances in wellness.

To enable the validation faster with the continuing challenges of the global supply chain (where the central pump in our product has gone from a 10 to a 45-week lead time to supply), we have decided to make some radical changes to our upcoming pioneer programs. We are redirecting the electronics and components of half of the 1,000 ashwagandhas (S3) study to the first alpha testing of a wellness fragrance at the beginning of 2023. This means that we will release our initial study in two waves, one at the beginning of 2023 and a second in the spring when we will have seen the initial results of ashwagandha from the first wave of 500 plant pioneers. So we are splitting into two studies the 1000 participants. Effectively, this means we are oversubscribed by about 50 Pioneers. The most effective solution we can think of is to prioritise those actively journaling in the leadup to the S3, thus giving the sofi brain the best chance of generating results.

The best way to maintain your position in the cue to be in the first wave would be to continue one journal a day. All those who have qualified for a sofi stick will receive one - we will simply prioritise the active journaling members into the first wave in the new year.

We will have more on this shortly, and as far as the timeline for the S3, we are looking at early February.

The expansion to test and validate beyond medicinal plants is a huge step forward for our sofi. And we wanted you to be the first to know of our plans for this. When sofi is finally available to all, she will provide the opportunity for dual relief and mood modulation, all using validated and effective natural and botanical plants and extracts.

We continue to build together.

xx

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Have to say this sounds exciting, cant wait to try it, fingers crossed. My other half is still looking for batteries for my sofi stick, but I’m doing the manual sprays. Im on valerian now, not as palatable as passiflora, but still sleeping very well. If the pods work so well to help us sleep, then the new pioneering wellness fragrances will hope fully be really helful.

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Great update very informative and I look forward to hearing more.

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Hi everyone, just been reading about a Blueberry extract which seems to be offering a similar kind of reaction to the Sofi program. The Sofi program is gathering pace and seems to me to be reaching much further ahead than I for one anticipated and I’m so looking forward to seeing what will appear down the line. Best wishes to all.
:angel::sleeping_bed:

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I’m really excited to participate in this. Thank you for the comprehensive updates an positivity.

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Wow this is fab news and so exciting to be a part of. I popped in actually to ask a question - that I know will be answered cos you guys are so on the ball with everything! It’s amazing what you’re doing xx

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With the S3 sticks that are under production now @MissTQ we will have a rechargable lithium cell … so no more watch batteries! :pray:

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I cannot wait to get a wellness spray, and see if they help improve my sleep.

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Will everyone be getting a new sofi stick or will it only be a few?

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That would be good, my other half has not had much luck finding any batteries, I’m recording my sprays manually and still journalling each day.

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Every one will receive the third gen sofi sticks @OberonMoon … we will prioritise first those active pioneers … @alexwalkerjones is very much working to make sure everyone is receiving support and hoping that will continue to journal between plant studies as that all helps to establish bigger baseline data for sofi to make more confident observations. But we will make sure all active pioneers from the S1 and S2 programs will receive the latest sofi sticks. :pray:

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Really looking forward to trying the ashwagandhas. I started on passiflora and noticed a definite improvement in my sleep. I am currently halfway through my valerian pods and unfortunately they don’t seem to be having much effect :unamused:

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Hi @Kaveh
Thats fascinating about fragrance and brilliant to hear that you are planning to incorporate plant smells in Sofi.

Something else i found very interesting

Get down and get dirty and …

… Smell the soil !

Studies have shown that a bacterium in the earth, Mycobacterium vaccae, works like an antidepressant by releasing serotonin (the natural “happy drug”) in your brain, much in the same way that Prozac works. The mind-altering (but harmless) bacterium has been found to boost levels of serotonin and norepinephrine in both mice and humans.

There are a few articles on this but here is one link:

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I love this … I can almost close my eyes and smell that wet mud smell that I find super uplifting … which is a weird thing to say about mud … I feel it particularly when it rains and you go for a muddy walk there is something more going on than getting a little bit muddy … it makes total sense to me and will read … thx for sharing this @drmudlark … I wonder what our own amazing sofi mama thinks of this …. @sonja.ekkers.77 xx :pray:

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Also @pamelaspence … this is something you probably have a feeling on! :pray:

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Absolutely! Thanks for tagging me :slight_smile:

Firstly I am SO excited with our next steps into functional fragrance. Aromatic medicine (which is a more traditional way to describe it) is one of the most ancient forms of medicine and although modern ‘aromatherapy’ is often treated as a lesser cousin of herbal medicine, it was once part of the whole package. Of course, perfumery grew out of this tradition and we have thousands of years of evidence of perfume being created, right back to the great ancient civilisations of the world. Of course for most of the history of perfume, the ingredients would have been plants!

Herbs that are traditionally used to affect our bodies through our noses are of course going to have a strong smell that permeates the air around us. Why? Because that smell indicates the presence of essential oils (also known as volatile oils). These oils are so light that they float up into the air and we breath them in. They interact directly with our olfactory nerve - the first, and shortest of our cranial nerves that begins in the nose and leads directly into the brain. This is the route where essential oils do most of their work (although some will also have effects directly on the skin - for example they are often also antimicrobial).

You may have heard that our sense of smell is one of the most evocative? This may well have to do with the immediacy of that physical connection from the olfactory nerve directly into the brain. Our ancestors may not have known about the WAY in which smell affected us, but they certainly witnessed it happening, and so harnessing the power of the effect of smell was born.

What sofi is doing, is bringing another dimension to this age old knowledge - we will be able to measure, for the first time, the actual effect of the fragrant molecules on you, our wonderful Pioneers, through the sofi app that the amazing tech team have been developing with your help.

It’s another step into the unknown to try to really understand what happens when one plant and one person meet.

I can’t wait to see the outcomes!

And as for this excellent article on the soil microbiome (thanks for sharing on this thread!) it just goes to show that we truly are living in relationship with all that surrounds us. We are only just scratching the surface of what the microbiome in our guts, and on our bodies is capable of and just how much we rely on it. So put away those pesticides, people and get your hands in the good earth! :slight_smile: :herb:

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Hallelujah! :partying_face::raised_hands:t3::clap:t3::partying_face: The sofi stick now is ok but this is awesome… if you could add a “find me” to the stick as well, that would be the ultimate!! This week I was challenged especially with my endogenous “finding” ability to locate anything and when it’s out of sight, out of mind! Setting an alarm this week to help me with that though … for some reason notifications aren’t happening but that may be easier with the lithium sprayer? I assume there will be notifications to remind us to charge? Unfortunately, insomniacs are notorious for forgetting stuff :joy:

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Hi @MissTQ , i cant buy the batteries in my town but they are very easy to get online with free postage and they arrive in a couple of days and, better still, fit through the letterbox so no having to be in to answer the door

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Thanks, good to know.

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