research
2019.10
Scents
The material has an unpleasant pungent smell due to the high acidity level. To get rid of the acidic smell, two methods have been executed: dimming the kombucha scent with other scents, and removing the kombucha scent itself by a special treatment.
Adding scents to the material has been done using three different ingredients, namely dried herbs, fresh herbs, and essential oils. Three techniques are used for the herbs, namely whole leaves, powdered/crushed leaves, and trapped in between layers.
In order to take control of the drying process speed, each sample is made twice: one is covered with a lid, and one is exposed to the open air.
Dried Herbs:
In this experiment, bacterial cellulose is combined with dried rosemary. Results show that covering the samples with a lid has resulted in a stronger rosemary scent than the samples without a lid. Due to mold growing on the material, samples without a lid are considered more effective.
From the three different techniques, trapping powdered rosemary between two layers has worked the best as the rosemary on the other samples did not stick well.
The scent strength is competitive compared to the others. However, when coconut oil was applied to slow down the biodegradation, the coconut scent seems to be dominant. As a continuation, another dried rosemary sample has been made using treated bacterial cellulose. This way, coconut oil is not needed. This sample surprisingly gave off a strong rosemary scent. The kombucha scent wasn’t evident at all through the experiment.
Fresh Herbs:
All fresh herbs samples surprisingly gave off an unpleasant grass scent instead of rosemary scent. In terms of the scent strength, the samples with the lid performed better even though it had grown mold after a few days. Just like the dried herbs samples, the rosemary leaves did not stick to the bacterial cellulose unless they are trapped in between layers.