Once upon a time, when you only had a brick of a cell phone with a monochrome tiny screen, all you could do was to send good old plain text messages.

Then, technology evolved, at a very fast pace and now you can send virtually anything via a smartphone, from icons and symbols, to photos and videos.

What the world needed, of course, was the possibility to also send smells and scents via a smartphone. Because hey, what can say “I love you!” on Valentines’ Day better than a rose bud picture accompanied by a rose bud scent? Can we possibly be able to send smelly messages via smartphones?

Two Harvard scientists say we are able to do so and they actually proved it. They invented a communication platform, a cell phone and an iOS app to be able to send scents. The experiment consisted in sending a smell from Paris to New York. Their first option? Champagne and passion fruit macaroon. Yummy!

How do all these devices work? Tech experts jumped the opportunity to take a closer look and describe this innovation to us:

A custom-made app allows you to take a photo of something and “tag” it with a few aroma notes (from more than 3,000 scents). These smells — which range in category from “Paris Afternoon” to “Plantation” — are transferred via a pipe-like smelling station called an oPhone Duo and are controlled by an iPhone app called oSnap. When you send an oNote, your recipient will click a link that leads him to a photo, as well as the specific aromatic notes you have chosen. When connected to the oPhone Duo, the hardware piece, it’ll emit slight scents from two separate pipes to be smelled in conjunction with the message. Otherwise, the app will just offer some vivid description of the scent your sender is trying to convey.

This is pretty neat, don’t you think? In case you’re wondering where and how you can get your hands on this interesting device, you can consult the start-up Indiegogo page and buy the oPhone hardware for that matter for $149. If you don’t want to buy the contraption, you can get the oSnapp app from the Play Store and use it with your iPhone to send photos that are tagged with about 16 different scents.

Is this smelly messages via smartphones opportunity useful in some way? Well, we don’t know yet, but its creators are quite confident in its future success. They want to use hot spots for people to try the whole experience and to address  those foodies interested in not only sharing pictures of their roast turkeys, but their scents too. Hope it works as planned.