Sillage

You have ten thousand photographs and not one smell.

Smell reaches memory before it reaches language. One molecule of a stranger's perfume and you are in a hallway in 1998, involuntarily, completely.

Sillage is three things: a diary for smells, a training programme for your nose, and a place to keep what is on your shelf. All of it stays on this phone.

I have a Sillage file

You cannot record a smell. You can encode one.

The trick is comparison. An adjective evaporates; a comparison sticks. Every entry asks you for one sentence of it, and hands you a shape to fill in.

Try it now. Something you can smell, or remember smelling.

This is the whole technique. It gets easier immediately.

A few minutes, most mornings.

Training is short and it uses what is already in your kitchen. Coffee, a lemon, cloves and mint will get you through the first week.

Remind me to train

One notification, composed on this device. You can turn it off at any time.

At

You are in the

The hemisphere is only used to decide which season an entry belongs to, so that a cold first morning surfaces last year's cold first morning.

Tracks

How the scoring works

You shuffle the jars and you mark yourself. Sillage cannot smell anything, so the number on your accuracy curve is exactly as honest as you are. Marking a miss is worth more than marking a hit: it is the only way the app knows which shelf to send you back to.

What did you smell?

Notes

Tags come from the lexicon, and every one you use grows your vocabulary.

Feeling

Where, and who

Place

Who was there

Wearing

The anchor

Training

Remind me

One notification for the next session, composed here and scheduled by Android.

At

How often

Resurfacing

Bring old entries back

Anniversaries, and the same week of the year. A soft haptic pulse when one lands.

Hemisphere

Used only to decide which season an entry belongs to.

The shelf

Currency mark

Show prices

Prices are private and stay on this device. Turn them off if you hand your phone around.

What Sillage cannot do

Reach the internet. The app does not hold the permission, so it cannot open a connection at all.
Decode batch codes. That needs a brand database nobody can verify, so it is not here rather than half here.
Take photographs. There is no camera permission. Every bottle on your shelf is drawn from its own name.
Know the weather. Rain-triggered resurfacing needed a live forecast, so entries come back by date and by season instead.

Your notebook

Import

An export is a plain file written to your Downloads folder by your own tap. It is not encrypted, so keep it where you would keep a diary.

Sillage. A diary for your most neglected sense.
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