The inspiration behind Katia Apalategui’s new business came from her mother, who held onto her late husband's pillowcase so she could always remember his distinctive smell.
Apalategui, an insurance saleswoman, thought it would be better to have an actual perfume made of the scent, and set about finding a way to make it happen. Eventually she wound up at France's University of Le Havre, where they came up with a technique to reproduce a smell. "We take the person's clothing and extract the odor — which represents about 100 molecules — and we reconstruct it in the form of a perfume in four days," Geraldine Savary of the University of Le Havre told Agence France-Presse.
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