Olfactory Comfort: French Perfume Smells Just Like Your Departed Spouse

For a lonely widow, a photograph can trigger a memory of happier days–but so can the familiar scent of her husband’s shaving lotion, his pipe tobacco, the shirts in his closet.

Katia Apalategui, grief-stricken after her husband’s passing, found consolation by burrowing her face into her late husband’s pillow, allowing his familiar scent to renew memories of their years together. So Katia had an idea:  Why not create a perfume which matched her late husband’s scent, so that she could keep the memory alive?

The idea worked so well, she set up a perfume company to produce morbid perfumes to order. With the help of French scientists and researchers at Le Havre University in northern France, Apalategui hopes to replicate  the scent of a departed loved one, extracting the fragrance from a deceased person’s clothing or personal items.

In an interview with the Mirror, Apalategui explained:

“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.

“There is a powerful link between smell and memory, which is on a par with photos, videos and other memories and can offer great comfort to the grieving.”

Her plan is to offer the custom perfumes to grieving family members, but she envisions the perfumes also being given as gifts to lovers on Valentine’s Day, or to children who must be separated from their parents.

Apalategui expects a bottle of the custom perfume, which should be available for special order later this year, to sell for  £400 ($611.36 in U.S. dollars).