This Device Matches The Aroma To Your Mood

The digital age has innovated countless ways to improve your quality of life: you can order dinner, a date, and check out your stock options all with a tiny little glowing screen that fits in the palm of your hand. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that there's yet another way to make your life easier (and perhaps quite a bit more relaxing) with the Cyrano, a new digital scent speaker that actually emits different scents from your phone based on your mood.

Aromatherapy is something that people have been using for millennia (think of the ancient usage of lavender and sage), but recently, it's taken on a whole new interest in the West. Nothing exemplifies that quite more than the Cyrano, a "Digital Scent Speaker and Mood Modification Platform." Using it is refreshingly simple — it's small enough to fit in your hand, and the cylindrical shape can hold up to three scent capsules, which each contain four scents. Developed by the company Vapor Communications, it connects to your smartphone and releases a "symphony" of distinct smells all from one place. You can match the scent to whatever your mood is with a mere few presses of a button.

What sets the Cyrano apart from other aromatherapy options is the ease of access and variety. Users can actually select different "playlists" on the device's companion app, and can choose from pre-made options such as "Get Relaxed," "Get Energized," and "Get Away." The "playlist" will release individual smells for 35 seconds at a time before switching to a new one to prevent what the company calls "olfactory fatigue." The device gives a 22-second pause between scents to give your nose a break. Scents in the kit include orange ginger, guava, honeysuckle, suntan and Venetian bellini. If you're partial to one over another, you can add and remove them from your app or playlist at will.

Of course, the most impressive part of all of this is the sheer fact that we've created a virtual scent experience on a digital platform. While technology has made unimaginable strides in terms of how we interact with sight and sound (think of how we listened to music just a decade ago, versus how popular, if not ordinary, smart phones and the like have become), digital scent manufacturing is an entirely different ballgame.

Cyrano is the product of many years of David Edwards, a Harvard professor's, time and effort. He has spent a good deal of his career trying to innovate olfactory-focused technology. In 2014, he launched oNotes, which allows users to "message" one another via scents through a device that connects to the app.

The company's latest gadget, the Cyrano, was unveiled this past Wednesday, and is available to purchase for $150 on the oNotes website.

Image: Vapor Communications (1); Vimeo