Company bottles the smell of your dead loved ones

When losing a loved one we often hold on to mementos to keep their memory alive—grandfather’s sweater, grandmother’s recipes. Now you can have the most potent memory of your deceased love one—their scent. Kalain’s Olfactory Links lets you create a perfume that replicates the individual scent of your passed relation.

No, we’re not joking.

Using the deceased person’s clothing and a four-day distillation process, Kalain’s Olfactory Links can bottle the individual’s unique odor for use as a fragrance—for somewhere close to the $1,000 mark (Canadian dollars). This process isn’t just limited to the dearly departed however, one look at Kalain’s Olfactory Links’ promotional video shows a variety of uses—Mom going back to work, long distance relationships, even your dog.

Katie Puckrik of The Guardian admits that with the recent loss of her parents she is a prime candidate for Olfactory Links—but that she doesn’t know that she would find their literal smell more comforting than the situations that remind her of her parents (ie. cut grass for her dad and ballet slippers for her mom). We have to agree. Scent is as situational as it is individual. Although scent can bring us back to a person, more often than not it brings us back to a time and place with that person. It is often the scents we associate with people that tug at our memories and not always the scent of their sweat, musk and skin—or their sweater.

As The Guardian reports, “Odour is a time machine, bypassing the frontal lobe to zap us smack in our lizard brain, conjuring primal surges of nostalgic wonder, lust and loss, broadcast in 3D deja vu.” So, while this might be the most effective way of remembering a loved one—scent is intimately linked to memory after all—it is also the strangest (especially with the choice word of odour—pronounced oh-dere—in the below video).

What do you think—a heartfelt reminder of a loved one, or a little too beyond-the-grave for your liking?
Let us know on Twitter (@TheWhaleTheRose).