Designer Amy Radcliffe at Central Saint Martins has developed a novel way by which people may now preserve delights for their olfactory senses. She's created this awesome camera called 'Madeleine', an invention which captures not images but smell. The camera's name has been derived from Marcel Proust's French novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), which studies the activation of involuntary memory after having a piece of Madeleine cake. With this creation, Radcliffe considers the possibility of manipulating users' emotional state via 'prescribed nostalgia'. "It's like a huge electric nose. It processes the particles and produces a graph-like formula that makes up the smell. From this formula you can artificially recreate the precise odor," she stated. This cam definitely adds an extra cool sensory dimension to all our happy memories.


The camera's perfumery technology works as follows- A dome-like funnel is placed over the object whose smell is to be captured. A blend of inert gases and absorbent materials are used to trap the molecular data of the fragrance, which is then sent to the lab for analysis. The final process converts the assembled molecules into smell memory capsules. The working prototype demands anything from a few minutes to about a day based on the scent to be captured.

The applications for this gadget are huge! Be it perfume companies trapping in their favorite fragrance, food industries recreating the finger-licking good food's aroma, tourism guys charming vacationers with the heavenly mountain's smell, or just say a lover preserving his better half's smell, the possibilities are endless.

Watch this video on 'how to succeed with your Madeleine' here: