Can a Scent Be Teleported? A Reflection on Osmo’s Olfactory Frontier

Not long ago, I came across a story that both thrilled and unsettled me: Osmo, a scent technology company, is developing what they call “Scent Teleportation” — a process designed to capture a smell in one part of the world and release it in another.

At first glance, it reads like science fiction:

A sensor captures the molecular signature of a lavender field.

A processor analyzes it.

A scent printer — currently the size of a refrigerator — reconstructs it in a lab in New York.

And just like that, a patch of Provence blooms in a clinical room, thousands of miles away.

But this isn’t fiction. It’s research in progress.

Osmo’s broader ambition is to digitize scent the way we digitized sound or image: to make it storable, transmittable, and reproducible. As someone who has spent years immersed in the history of perfumery, in the residue of unguentaria, the recipes of Avicenna, and the ritual of distillation — I feel both awe and caution.

Because scent has always been the most elusive sense — the most poetic, the most haunting. It resists permanence. It cannot be fully captured in language. It is tied to memory, intimacy, and intuition, and it is shaped by culture as much as chemistry.

The Material and the Immaterial

What Osmo is attempting is bold: to reduce scent to data, and to treat it like a modular code. Theoretically, it’s sound. We already analyze essential oils with GC-MS machines; we already know the functional roles of molecules like linalool, thymol, and eugenol.

But I wonder: is smell just molecules?

I think of rose attar, carefully distilled from tens of thousands of petals at dawn. I think of the oakmoss used in chypre perfumes — scraped by hand, aged in wood barrels. I think of the medicinal smoke of burnt myrrh or the holy scent of gülab used in Ottoman shrines.

What travels through the air is more than chemistry. It’s ritual, terrain, intention. It’s the climate of the moment, the memory of the hands that harvested the plant. And most of all, it’s what that scent means to the person breathing it in.

You can recreate lavender’s molecular structure. But can you transmit the wind that rustled it, the soil that fed it, the history it carries?

Digitizing the Ephemeral

And yet… I don’t dismiss it.

There is profound potential here. Imagine:

• A museum exhibit where visitors not only see ancient manuscripts but also smell the ink and the vellum.

• Diaspora communities reconnecting with the scent of home from afar.

• A hospice patient inhaling the smell of her childhood orchard one last time.

There’s something deeply human in the desire to send smell across time and space — to bridge absence with presence.

Perhaps this is less about teleportation and more about translation.

But as with all acts of translation, we must ask: What is lost? And what, miraculously, is retained?

The Ethics of Scent as Data

If we can digitize scent, we must also confront uncomfortable questions:

• Who owns the scent of a rose that grows in a sacred grove in Iran?

• Will indigenous or historical scents be replicated without consent, the way songs and stories have been?

• If AI can create new smells, will perfumery become a closed circuit of synthetic memory?

We are standing at a threshold. And as always, the question is not only can we do it?

But also: How will we do it with care, context, and reverence?

What We Carry in the Air

In a sense, perfumers, healers, and scent historians have always practiced a kind of scent teleportation. We work with the intangible. We distill the invisible. We transmit meaning through air.

What Osmo is building is a new tool — a powerful one. But a tool is only as wise as the hand that wields it.

Let us be those hands — precise, ethical, grounded in the soil as much as the sensor.

Because scent isn’t just something we release. It’s something we remember.