The Sense We Knocked Out of Ourselves
Fry and Professor Farnsworth with the Smell-o-scope, Futurama S01E08
In the first season of Futurama, Professor Farnsworth invents a smell-o-scope that can sniff out any corner of the universe. He tells us Jupiter smells like strawberries and Uranus smells like — well, those silly jokes ended in the year 2620 when the planet was renamed to ‘Urectum’. Using the invention, Fry discovers a big ball of garbage hurtling towards the Earth, with a smell so bad it doesn’t even register on the ‘funkometer’. The rest of the episode sees the Planet Express staff venture to save Earth from a stinky demise, all while viewers conjure — or resist to conjure — the smell of that much rubbish. The writers use the smell-o-scope as subterfuge — it’s an invention that’s both comical (to the layman, what’s there to smell in space?) and very scientifically useful. Smell can tell us a huge amount of information that we can’t perceive visually, and yet to our detriment as a society, smell is the sense that we’ve knocked out of ourselves.
Space does indeed smell. Just above the Earth, a spacesuit smells of “pleasant sweet-smelling welding fumes” once back inside the airlock, according to astronaut Don Petitt. What he’s smelling is the chemical compounds that form after the combustion of dying stars — polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; molecules which have the same smell ‘vibration’ as carcinogens — burnt, crisp, brown, black. Moondust has a gunpowder smell. If we pointed the smell-o-scope at the dust cloud of Sagittarius B2, we would smell something like raspberries and rum due to the molecules of ethyl formate discovered there by astrobiologists a decade ago. If we had something as powerful as a smell-o-scope, the search for amino acids — the molecular indicator of possible alien life — would be a lot easier than the calculations needed for deciphering radio waves that SETI use today.
The human nose can distinguish millions of different odours — we are somewhere in the middle of mammalian olfactory proficiency (good, but not the best) — and yet we haven’t harnessed this ability to its full potential: the language of smell is limited, we live in olfactory ignorance. Smell expert, Alex Russell, explains, “Smell is really complex, and we know quite a lot, but we’re missing basic information, like what it is in the odour molecule that our smell receptors react to. We understand with vision that the wavelength matters. We get that it’s all about frequency with sound. With smell, it’s not as simple.” Smell carries so much information that science has not yet parsed all that it tells us, or the multitude of ways we’re not harnessing it, yet. Russell says, “[…] We don’t have a predictive model of smell. […] It seems like we have receptors that react in different ways to different types of molecules, and we have a lot of different receptors firing at any one time. So, working out what receptors are reacting to, and then how our brain deciphers the messages, appears to be a computational problem […] Once we work that out, and develop this predictive model of smell, then it’ll open up a world of possibilities from there.”
This simple, yet significant, gap in knowledge is why smell technology lags behind what we’ve created for visual and aural entertainment. Smell has tried, though. Audiences for the 1960 smell-o-vision film ‘Scent of Mystery’ were mostly bemused when a hissing sound in the cinema finally emitted scents like tobacco, shoe polish and baking bread during scenes, only to linger in the theatre and become redundant additions to the narrative. More recently, smell-o-technology tends towards the superficial — a “Then what?”-type of experience — like the oPhone: a device that gave tech writers content for a while in 2015, but failed to generate much excitement with the public. The oPhone app necessitated gadgets owned by at least two parties, not unlike walkie-talkies, which could release a scent when instructed by the sender. The prototype promo video suggested that sending your friend the smell of coffee — not the exact smell of the actual coffee you were drinking, just the device’s coffee smell molecules — would “tell a story worth a thousand words”. Why? Because smell and memory are interwoven and invoke so much more than just sending and receiving pics. So, you have a phone that smells like coffee. Then, what? The device had some glaring limitations. Alex Russell explains, “Some of the more interesting smells are made of hundreds of ingredients. If you resent buying expensive ink cartridges for printers, I imagine that you would feel the same about buying hundreds of odours samples, [too].”
oPhone, 2015
The adage about the connection between smell and memory is vaguely known by most, but we’re usually reminded of it in times of disgust or nostalgia. Smell is interpreted by the olfactory bulb in the limbic system of the brain, which is the oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily-speaking. Indeed, early humans had to remember what approaching predators and poisonous plants smelt like for survival. But the nose isn’t the only sniffer of the body. In the dark recesses of our insides, other parts of our body also use olfactory receptors to parse information from chemical changes in their surroundings: from sperm seeking out an egg, to cells in the kidneys which sniff out the amount of blood in urine.
Our sense of smell does a lot to regulate our outside environment, too. For survival, our ‘stress sweat’ from the apocrine sweat glands is released by our nervous system in the face of perceived high-risk situations — its smell so pungent as to repel predators seeking a homo sapiens lunch. We have also added the sulphurous smelling gas mercaptan to natural gas so we can better detect the normally odourless but volatile substance. We use our noses to detect excessive bitterness in foods for possible toxicity and seek out energy-rich sweet things. Over time, humans have had to be experimental with these initial olfactory reactions to evolve cuisines that include bitter and sour aromas. For example: coffee, fermented foods and drinks, the perceived medicinal qualities of herbs, the antibacterial benefits of spiced meats, and satisfying our penchant for a ‘benign masochism’ in gastronomic pleasure (eating chillies, mustards, peppers) — these have all arisen from trial and error with smell. Similarly, not all safeguards are instinctive — we have to teach children why certain putrid odours, like the smell of spoiled food or excrement, should not be explored. We have to teach this because smell is inherently neutral, so we baggage our kids with a memory of disgust. While we have had a few thousand years to navigate smells that can be detrimental to our survival, the perception of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ smells is still a social construct. Taken as gospel, this binary has put our sense of smell into a dark age.
Today, we demand a monochromatic world of ‘good’ smells, and consumers of packaged aromas can be predictable. Nostalgia plays a huge role in what perfume scents people gravitate towards. Food smells are accessible, so honey and coconut are popular with people who don’t give other scents much thought. Orange fruits and vegetables that contain carotenoids produce more appealing man-sweat, so citrus smells tend to be bought for and by men. Vanilla bases, reminiscent of breast milk and considered aphrodisiacal, are popular for women because they attract men who are sniffing out fertility. Patchouli smells — those musky, earthy, spicy scents — are linked to a generation covering marijuana stench. As a moth repellent, it was a natural way of perfuming expensive trade goods from the ‘orient’, which made patchouli a smell of exotic opulence, as well. The way these smells are packaged has relied on a heteronormative marketplace. That floral or woody scents are inherently feminine or masculine, respectively, is an arbitrary concoction of the times we live in, like how pink and blue came to be colours for girls and boys. We might remember our grandmother’s potpourri-scented bathroom and associate florals with older women, but that’s as far as the science goes in regards to why.
Our perception and memories drive smell association. If in a blind test someone smells isovaleric acid they will either recoil if told it’s body odour, or they might fondly remember their last toasted sandwich if told it’s cheddar. If our first time to the beach was on a cloudy day with seaweed littering the sand, perfuming the coast with brine, our idea of a beach holiday will be different to those who remember a heavy scent of frangipani and coconut lotion. We might pass by a chocolate factory and drool, but someone who has worked there for twenty years probably just feels tired. A cursory search for an explanation for scent preference reveals that the pop literature on smells resides purely in the superficial. Perfume blogs read more like whiskey tasting menus. Preference is subjective and descriptions whimsical. Scents trend like fashion, and the two industries are linked. There is a top-down approach to creating new perfumes that can sit among the mainstays. Celebrities can create new scents by selecting smells they ‘like’ and perfumers will reap in the short term profits no matter how gaudy the fragrance. Yearly predictions of trends talk of ‘light florals’ and ‘unisex scents’, while, recently, these luxury items have started to rebrand themselves as ‘sustainable’ by donating profits to NGOs. The multi-billion dollar industry, dominated by corporations like International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), Symrise, and Givaudan, is notoriously secretive and rarely reflects on the why of its choices, at least publicly. Alex Russell explains that “[…] because we don’t have a predictive model of smell, [these] companies spend a lot of time working out how to make a particular smell. They start with an idea, mix some odours together, and see how it comes out — trial and error. Then they’ll tweak it, making many different versions of the samples, to find one that works. That’s a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of material — and therefore, a lot of money. If they come up with a formula that works, then why would you give it away to the competition?”
The other big business for smells is aromatherapy, an even more esoteric take on scent than perfume. Perfume, at least, appeals mostly to personal preference rather than claiming healing properties as aromatherapy does. Because the two are entwined in the popular understanding of scent products, both suffer the same offhand consideration, like the olfactory cousin of poetry. Unlike poetry, however, there’s a lot of money to be made. So both industries encourage the belief that bad smells should be covered by good ones, and we are prepared to pay for them.
Smell experts — that is, experts in the science of all types of smells, like Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian researcher and artist — agree that we are in that ‘dark age’ of olfactory understanding. She says this is because, increasingly, people rely on the visual to the point that we are disembodied from each other. On dating apps, social media, and in advertising everything rests on how the face and body look. We prefer to assess each other through screens rather than in gathering spaces, robbing us of proximity to pheromones and other personal identifying odours. Tolaas’ objective is to revolutionise the way we talk about and interact with smell, forcing us out of the binary of good versus bad. She says that over the past couple of hundred years we have become desensitised. From the nineteenth century when the upper classes showed status by washing regularly and covering up body odour, to shopping malls pumping cinnamon and vanilla through the vents, synthetic scents have overpowered the nuances of the everyday, even to the point of being harmful to health. Smell is a masterful manipulator — it can make people stay in a store longer or buy treats they weren’t actually craving — but this ultra-capitalistic use is just the tip of the iceberg of synthetic smell possibilities.
It’s possible to ‘capture’ and replicate the whole spectrum of smells, not just the enticing ones, which is an ongoing project of Tolaas’s. She wants us to train our noses to adapt to natural smells in our environment and has even developed a new language for them called ‘Nasalo’. Her practice has involved travelling and collecting smells from all over the world by capturing the smell molecules from a diverse array of pungent places. In art galleries, Tolaas has designed interactive smelling walls that showcase the home city’s smells back to its residents, distilling another characteristic layer of the place. For example, at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, there were smells of dry earth after a bushfire and a heady mix of garbage and dog poo. She has also collaborated with Supersense — an Austrian collective who specialise in analog gadgets — to create the ‘Smell Memory Kit’, a very small-scale version of the devices Tolaas uses to capture her library of smells. Elsewhere, other artists and scientists play with the history of smell in museums; there are unassuming archives of smell; and smell training kits for those with partial smell loss. Looking to the future, a ‘Homesickness Kit’ was created to preserve the ‘universal’ smells of the Earth for astronauts on Mars. The scents chosen, through research across a variety of cultures, were rose, jasmine, lotus, linden blossom, birch, pine, sandalwood, and lemon, though all these scents still fall into the cursed category of ‘good’ and are associated with perfumes. Why would you leave out the biochemical odour of petrichor? Or the carcinogenic smell of barbecued onions, or even wet dog? According to someone like Tolaas, our sensory memory shouldn’t be steamrolled by pleasantness when there are other ‘colours’ that can deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world.
Sissel Tolaas’s Nasalo: a vocabulary of smells (for example, ‘hakse’ means a smell like green bean pods, while ‘tarnek’ means a smell like burned rubber and kerosene)
The problem with these artistic and archival applications of smell is how inaccessible they are to those not in the same physical space. We can make audio and visual content go viral, but smell is far from an instant share. It’s ephemeral — we can only communicate each qualia of smell through similes and mutual experiences of it. So far, most attempts at injecting smell into popular technology is met with that “Then, what?” apathy, or the technology is still taking baby steps. For instance, digital smells created by manipulating receptors in the brain are only vague and nonspecific as of 2018, which means electronic ‘noses’ (like cochlear implants for hearing loss) for those with anosmia (loss of smell) are still in their infancy. Meanwhile, digital nose gadgets that can ‘read’ smells are making some ground, though these are anathema to people like Tolaas who see a working nose as something we shouldn’t disable any further — she says that smells are just too complex to parse through an electronic ‘reader’. What the digital nose could do, however, is monitor pollution levels and assess the quality of food, jobs that a trained human nose would have to be paid hazard compensation for. Another problem facing smell tech is the cost. As a relatively new field, devices are only sold in limited runs and at a premium, like Tolaas’ (n)visible ring — a piece of jewellery that omits a protective barrier of odour for long walks home in the dark — at €20, 000 for one of the six made. Or, an idea surfaces like the Madeleine, a prototype of a ‘smell camera’, and then vanishes without fanfare or the necessary funding to get it off the ground.
The Madeleine, 2013
What else for the future of smell, then? When over half of a group of surveyed young people said that they’d rather lose their sense of smell than lose a laptop or smartphone, the case for pushing people to smell more than just the roses seems like a losing battle. How will smell step into popular consciousness? In what new and practical ways will it serve the human population? How will it evolve from the trivial to a language that is considered across disciplines and not just something to monetise?
For urban design, there are now smellscapes and smell mapping to assist in adding new sensory elements to city spaces, while in the medical sciences research continues on disease detection through smell before it’s been tested for in extracted samples (like blood or marrow). Diseases such as cancers, Parkinson’s, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and liver and kidney failure all have odour that can be detected by either humans or trained dogs. Having staff trained to know these smells could help with preemptive measures to lessen the extent of the disease. The implications of this knowledge could even change the way we interact with other people day to day, being able to sense who is sick around us. As yet, a universal language of smell, like musical notation, hasn’t been formulated outside of Tolaas’ work to disseminate these findings. Furthermore, there could be a considerable impact on how we treat mental health issues that are associated with the limbic system, like trauma, by using patient-specific smells to calm fight or flight impulses. And there is significant research into how anosmia is linked to schizophrenia. Smell can also be used to enhance study and help spark memory for exams.
How else could we improve this primitive part of our brains that deals with memory and emotional responses? Can exposure to and rewiring our reactions to smells strengthen emotional intelligence and empathy? Have our increasingly sterile environments reduced our capacity to deal with unwarranted disgust?
Smelly Map
Maybe smell continues to remain an abstraction because reading about it only conjures half the sensory experience. Most books on the topic focus on perfume, while only a handful talk about the mysteries and discoveries covered here. There seems to be more articles on the smell of old books than books on the science of smell. This article was born of a fantasy of a library of smells in every city around the world. Somewhere to go to learn a language of smells to describe those you can’t name already. Somewhere that could teach you why a certain combination of chemicals is neither good nor bad, but a neutral odour that can morph depending on how you perceive it (foot sweat or cheese, or both?). A library with a treasure trove of scents from places never travelled to. A section with menus from every cuisine in the world that you could sniff and savour. And until digital smell technology masters spontaneous smell creation, imagine one physical place to pour over the neglected olfactory bouquet/feast/symphony/colour wheel. People would spend hours there. They would stop to smell.
Aftelier Perfume Museum