French style student Charline Ronzon-Jaricot has developed a device that releases a bespoke scent during a moment customers would like to remember .
Charline Ronzon-Jaricot’s prototype for the Evanescence project comprises an inverted glass flask suspended above a small plaster stone.
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At a chosen moment, the user breaks the tip off the flask to release one particular drip of the liquid scent. This is soaked up by the plaster pebble.
The intention is that the user removes the pebble from the device and stores it away till they want to recall that specific moment, when the scent must evoke memories of the selected event.
To enable just one drop to be released, Ronzon-Jaricot developed the flask with a little glass ball that obstructs the broken tip, allowing just one drop by way of. The flask was hand-blown by the Silicybine society in Paris.
“The aim of this project is to highlight the strength of olfactory memory by producing one’s own ‘madeleine de Proust’,” said the designer, referring to French novelist Marcel Proust’s famous passage on voluntary and involuntary memory. Proust related how the taste of madeleines – little French cakes – relates to “a micro-event that brings back memories of youth”.
Proust wrote: “The smell and taste of issues remain a lot longer, like souls, remembering, waiting (…) and bear unfaltering, the immense edifice of memory.”
Ronzon-Jaricot worked with Parisian perfumer Sarah Burri to generate a new scent that would not have any pre-existing associations, employing only synthetic molecules.
“We worked on a surprising smell that didn’t activate any typical imaginary,” she mentioned. “It had to be neither a space fragrance nor a physique perfume.”
The designer also experimented with a range of materials to find which would greatest soak up the scent. Porcelain did not capture the odour, and clays altered the smell. Plaster provided the most neutral alternative.
“I also required one thing easy and not to expansive to function with, simply because I had to make many of them for my presentation,” said Ronzon-Jaricot, who hopes to continue creating the project that she created as a student at Paris’ École Boulle style school.
