French Company Bottles Up Scents of Your Loved Ones
One French company plans to bottle up the scents of your loved ones for $600. (Photo: Trunk Archive)
Scent has the power to conjure up our most dormant memories and change our moods—it’s why we tend to hold on to old blankets and shirts and from loved ones and never wash them. Even Marcel Proust wrote about how our senses bear the weight of our memories—the “Proust phenomenon” is coined after the scene in In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator, unable to conjure childhood memories by sheer will, becomes inundated with them after putting a cookie in his mouth. It was “by taste and smell alone.”
After watching her mother hold onto her deceased husband’s pillowcase in a futile attempt to keep hold of his scent, 52-year-old French insurance saleswoman Katia Apalategui was inspired to find ways to replicate an individual person’s scent. Agence France-Presse reports that she spent years “knocking on doors” before she met scientists at the University of Le Havre who had developed a way to bottle up human smell.
“We take the person’s clothing and extract the odor—which represents about a hundred molecules—and we reconstruct it in the form of a perfume in four days,” chemist Geraldine Savary told Agence France-Presse. Apalategui claims that the custom scent will provide “olfactory comfort,” like the comfort you get when you hug a teddy bear from a loved one. Apalategui plans to launch the company in September, with help from her her son, who is in business school. “We are going through funeral homes to offer families a small box containing a vial of the departed’s odor that we would have extracted from a piece of material provided by them,” she told Agence France-Presse.
It’s not just for the family of the deceased, though. Long distance lovers, college students living away from their parents for the first time, and those same parents learning to live with extra empty bedrooms in the house could also be interested in the $600 scent—a small price to pay for a lifetime of memories.
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