Bottling the Essence of Your Loved One

Credit: Dennis Wong

Scent is a powerful thing. Studies have shown that smell and memory are more closely connected than any of the other four senses.

What if you could hold the smell of your loved one in a bottle forever?

One French company has the means to do just that. Katia Apalategui, with the help of researchers from University of Le Havre, have come up with a process to bottle the essence of a person’s scent.

So far, they’re still perfecting their technique. Customers can order their own scents as early as September 2015, and the service will cost about $600.

While it’s not yet clear how exactly the company will obtain the scents, they say they use a person’s clothes to come up with the perfect scent that captures what the person most smelled like.

It could be as simple as the smell of fresh-baked cookies, or as complicated as the scent of rain falling on the mulch of a lakeside.

Credit: Vetiver Aromatics

We don’t often think about the impact that a scent has on us until we’re brought back to a childhood memory from something we haven’t smelled in a while. It could be as simple as the smell of fresh-baked cookies, or as complicated as the scent of rain falling on the mulch of a lakeside.

If you’ve ever had a loved one who always wore one particular perfume or cologne, you’ve probably experienced a wave of memory when you smell that scent on someone else. The same feeling can happen when your loved one’s work rubs off on them at the end of the day. A baker might smell like cake batter, while a firefighter might smell like smoke.

Scents you would commonly think of as disgusting are the base of nearly every perfume on the market today.

While it sounds a little gross to capture the scent of someone’s clothes into a bottle, it’s part of a common practice that’s been elevated to an art form for hundreds of years. Scents you would commonly think of as disgusting are the base of nearly every perfume on the market today.

Since our memories are so closely tied to smell, perfume makers will use scents ranging from musk to bile and even fecal matter just to get our attention. Don’t worry, these scents aren’t strong enough to make you gag. Some of the most popular perfumes in the world are made from some of these ingredients, balanced out in such a way that makes them more appealing than scents without these ingredients.

Credit: Dávid Kótai

We evolved to fear large creatures, so the smell of animal musk instantly gets our attention. Although it doesn’t smell great in itself, it goes straight to the brain and lights up its memory centers. This is also why certain foods smell so great to us.

A similar process could happen with your loved one’s scent. Imagine spraying a bottle filled with the scent at your loved one’s memorial, and feeling as though they’re standing right there in the room with you.

To get your own loved one’s scent preserved as a perfume, you’d need a few articles of their (preferably unwashed) clothing. For families who have boxes of their loved one’s things sitting in an attic somewhere, this could preserve them in a new way.

As the science around this process improves, you could carry a little bottle with the scent to spray whenever you miss someone.