originality

custom fits

Many years ago, I heard of a shop in Paris that could craft a rare perfume just for you. You'd be guided trough a multiple level process, selecting base scents to make up the different notes needed to create a custom parfum. The chances you'd have of selecting the same notes as someone else would be minute, but even if your choices were the same, its scent would be different once worn. Perfume reacts to the uniqueness of your body chemistry, and your chemistry fluctuates over time.

As rare as it seems to have your own custom perfume bottle, it pales in comparison to the magnificent diversity within humanity, so it is surprising to see the multiple ways of trying to fit people into a small set of perfect boxes, often unrealistic and unreachable.

Not only can we not become someone else who is as unique as each one of us, but we should question why we would want to. Even a clone could not be you, because he/she/they/ze could not have the same experiences you have had.

Many times, these categories and stereotypes are said to determine our fortune, but only based on quantifiable qualities used to measure you against others, turning fortune into an illusion of a triangle with just a few people fitting at the top.

Life, however, is more like a turning wheel of experiences, and our fortune rarely depends on where you are on the wheel nor which categories you happen to fit into.

In a similar fashion, sometimes products start looking like clones. Although some of the design features that make it to our hands benefit from familiarity, apps and websites also need something that sets them apart. A product maker can imitate, especially at the beginning of the building process, as they start to learn the tools of the trade, but with time, creativity should flourish.