Scentography

Scentography is the technique of creating and storing odor by artificially recreating a smell using chemical and electronic means.

DigiScents Inc was among the more recent pioneers of the technology, developing DigiScent (later iSmell) in 1999 as a device that would plug into a computer's USB port and generate scents dependent on the online content being viewed. The company ceased trading in 2011.[1][2]

In 2013, Amy Radcliffe, a Master's student in the Textile Futures department of Central Saint Martins, London introduced a prototype of a desktop device to record aromas. For the project, she drew on headspace technology pioneered in the 1980s by Roman Kaiser to capture smells in the air around certain objects.[3]

Called the Madeleine, after the Marcel Proust episode from Remembrance of Things Past, the device is a working prototype of a new kind of camera to record smell.[3] It consists of a funnel to be placed over the object with the scent you wish to capture. This is attached to a pump that draws air into an odor trap made of a porous polymer resin. According to Radcliffe, it can take from a few minutes to a whole day to capture the odour in liquid form, depending on its intensity.[3]

So far, several samples have been sent for analysis in a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry machine at a fragrance laboratory. In the scenario developed for the prototype, the Madeleine would be taken for local lab processing in a similar way to conventional photographic film.[3][4]

The device was exhibited during Milan Fashion Week in April 2013.[4]