Victorian jewellery made from hair. Cremated remains compressed into diamonds. The elderly lady in Pennsylvania who lived with the embalmed bodies of her husband and twin sister. Our culture is buried in ingenious methods of preserving the essence of our dearly departed. But the latest balm for the bereaved is just that: balm. Or more specifically, perfume derived from a loved one’s body scent, devised by a French insurance saleswoman grief-stricken at her father’s death.

Katia Apalategui, 52, was inspired by her mother, who treasured her late husband’s pillowcase with its traces of his precious smell. “This gave me the idea of bottling a dead person’s unique scent,” says Apalategui. “So that grieving relatives can keep their loved one’s memory alive.”

Odour is a time machine, bypassing the frontal lobe to zap us smack in our lizard brain

As a more benign version of the serial killer in Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, who seeks to capture the physical odour of his victims, Apalategui rallied scientists at Le Havre university to her cause. A high-tech variation of boiling dad down to a reduction sauce was developed, utilising the person’s clothing and a four-day distillation process. Along the way, approximately 100 molecules of an individual’s unique bodily odour are reconstructed into perfume.

Apalategui calls her concept Olfactory Links, and the company’s animated video presentation suggests further applications for the idea: the smell of baby to soothe the back-to-work mum, or of eau de Rover after he’s gone off to that big dog park in the sky. A bottle of what Apalategui calls “olfactory comfort” will set one back almost £500.

The power of smell to instantly beam us back through our history, comforting and otherwise, is well documented. 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.

The perfume industry capitalises on our susceptibility to nasal manipulation. This is the idiosyncratic theatre of the nose where celebrity “signature scents” flourish alongside holographic renderings of roast beef (CB Beast by CB I Hate Perfume) and riots (Lisa Kirk’s Revolution).

In fact, people-niff has been explored before, notably by the French brand Etat Libre d’Orange. Their Sécrétions Magnifiques faithfully evokes blood, sweat, breast milk and semen (but not urine or faeces, perhaps considered not suitably magnifique). Even closer to Olfactory Links’ turf is My DNA Fragrance, a Beverly Hills firm cooking up scents infused with genetic material from the likes of Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe.

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Master perfumer Sophia Grojsman calls fragrance “medicine for the soul”. Both my parents died in recent years, so my “medicine cabinet” includes their favourite scents: Dad’s Old Spice and my mother’s Youth Dew. The smallest sniff of these perfumes triggers some powerful juju, a melancholic brew where “olfactory comfort” battles it out with longing and regret.

This makes me a potential candidate for Olfactory Links, I suppose. But family smell associations are both more nuanced and more abstract than anything produced by an enfleurage of my parents’ senior-style velour tracksuits. I don’t know that I’d find their literal smell more comforting than that of cut grass (Dad mowing the lawn), or of leather ballet slippers (Mom driving me to dance class), or even of the lung-shrivelling damp that crept up from the cellar as their house aged along with them.

Olfactory Links’s invisible taxidermy is the perfume equivalent of going to a medium. Boyfriend-in-a-bottle might offer solace in the short term, but getting stuck in a smell could hold future happiness hostage. How long before a medicine becomes a drug, going from comfort to fetish to crutch?

Smell, like life, is evanescent, and grief should be as well. The long fade-out of the scent from the pillowcase is a bittersweet blessing.