Intere-scent-ing opinion

I cannot have you experience what I am smelling now. Nor what I smelled in that nice Dutch bakery in town. Or what it smelled like in Central Park. I can show you pictures, I can show you video, I can take audio clips, I can bring home grass clippings, stones, or other sensory objects so you know what it feels like. But I cannot capture scent. And isn't that funny?

We live in a day and age of unbridled technological advancement. We have the most clarity in motion capture that we have ever seen before. Even high-definition is getting high-definition upgrades. We can communicate with friends and family all over the globe, just as much as if they were by us face-to-face. And as consumers, we can take pictures to capture sight. We can use audio recorders to capture sound. We can taste. We can touch. But smell? There is no way we can share smell. At all.

The closest way is smelling scents, whether in candles, perfume or air fresheners. These manufactured smells help to share an array of scents, like vanilla, cinnamon, or "skin renewal," whatever that smells like. (That's actually the title of my after shave. I bought it because I thought it smelled nice.) (More parenthesis: Olfaction is the technical term referring to the sense of smell.) We can buy these scents, made diligently in hard-working labs across the globe. But can the average consumer bottle a scent? Can we capture the smell of homemade pizza sauce cooking on the stove? No. There is no real way the average person can share smell. It just is not done.

Now, if someone young enterprising man or woman came out with a "camera for smells," would it be popular, apart from prank-loving teenagers who would abuse it to it's full potential? I don't know. Have there been studies done? Is there a market for smell capturing? It seems to me like there's a market for everything. Surely there must be for this.