Smell, more than any of our other senses, has a way of digging up memories from our past. We all have them—those vague, familiar scents that you can’t quite put your finger on but remind you of your grandmother’s house or a warm summer night or of someone you love. These whimsical moments of nostalgia waft across our consciousness as we walk past a bakery or sit next to a stranger on the train, and they fade away just as quickly as they appeared. But what if they didn’t have to disappear? What if you could capture the smells and keep them in little glass bottles until the next time you wanted to revisit a memory?
>Capsules that would allow people to get a snapshot of a past moment.
That's the goal of Amy Radcliffe's most recent project, Scent-ography. The London-based designer wanted to create an object that could systematically capture scents and turn them into olfactory photographs. “The recorded image, the way we use it now anyway, has kind of lost its value,” she says. “You don’t print pictures and store them in shoeboxes anymore. They’re not tangible and are very disposable.” Called the Madeline, Radcliffe’s prototype aims to tap into the instinctual, emotional memories that scent is believed to prompt. The ceramic machine functions much like a 35mm camera, only instead of capturing light information and producing photographs, it captures the molecular makeup of a smell and outputs little scent memory capsules.
Radcliffe's Madeline is a delicate and fanciful machine, but the technology behind it has actually been used by scientists and fragrance houses for decades. Headspace technology is the process that allows perfumers to bottle the notes of a rose or a scientist to analyze the scents of a rainforest. To capture any smell, an object is placed inside a hollow glass dome that is hooked up to an odor trap via an air hose. As air is sucked from the dome, it's absorbed by the trap, which is essentially a small glass tube filled with an absorbent polymer resin. Depending on the concentration of the smell, it can take minutes or days to adequately capture a scent, with Radcliffe noting that citrus fruit would take only minutes to document, while something more subtle, like a general environment or the smell of a person’s skin would take a bit longer.
In more commercial uses, the resin would then be shipped off for molecular analyzing where fragrance scientists would synthetically rebuild the smell for whatever purpose they had. Radcliffe’s end goal is similar, but instead of creating a perfume, she wants to turn the scent data into capsules that would allow people to get a snapshot of a past moment. "Your odor memories are very fragile; if you smell something too often you’ll erase that memory," she says. “With the Madeline you snap them open, get a hit of that memory, and then it’s gone."