Posts Tagged ‘smell’
“To-day I think / Only with scents”*…
We’ve considered before smell, the unsung hero of the senses. Today, Kaja Šeruga explains how scientists using chemistry, archival records, and AI are reviving the aromas of old libraries, mummies and battlefields…
We often learn about the past visually — through oil paintings and sepia photographs, books and buildings, artifacts displayed behind glass. And sometimes we get to touch historical objects or listen to recordings. But rarely do we use our sense of smell — our oldest, most primal way of learning about the environment — to experience the distant past.
Without access to odor, “you lose that intimacy that smell brings to the interaction between us and objects,” saysanalytical chemist Matija Strlič. As lead scientist of the Heritage Science Laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and previously deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, Strlič has devoted his career to interdisciplinary research in the field of heritage science. Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.
Reconstructed scents can enhance museum and gallery exhibits, says Inger Leemans, a cultural historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smell can provide a more inviting entry point, especially for uninitiated visitors, because there’s far less formalized language for describing smell than for interpreting visual art or displays. Since there’s no “right way” of talking about scent, she says, “your own knowledge is as good as the others’.”
Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlič and Leemans, is trying to change that — combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage…
Read on for the fascinating details: “Recreating the smells of history,” from @knowablemag.bsky.social.
* Edward Thomas, “Digging“
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As we take a whiff, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that Coco Chanel agreed with the Wertheimer brothers Pierre and Paul, directors of the perfume house Bourjois, to create a new corporate entity, Parfums Chanel, Its signature product was Chanel No. 5. She had been selling small quanitites of the scent in her boutique since 1921.
Traditionally, fragrances worn by women had fallen into two basic categories. Respectable women favored the essence of a single garden flower while sexually provocative indolic perfumes heavy with animal musk or jasmine were associated with women of the demi-monde. Chanel sought a new scent that would appeal to the flapper and celebrate the seemingly liberated feminine spirit of the 1920s. Her scent was formulated by chemist and perfumer Ernest Beaux, who designed an unprecedented olfactory architecture, a bouquet of 80 scents whose precious notes were blended with high proportions of aldehydes, organic compounds that carry a crisp, soapy, and floral citrusy scent. In late 1920, when presented with small glass vials containing sample scents numbered 1 to 5 and 20 to 24 for her assessment, she chose the fifth vial. Chanel told Beaux, “I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year and so we will let this sample number five keep the name it has already, it will bring good luck.”
The first promotion for Chanel No. 5 appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 1924– a small ad for Parfums Chanel announcing the Chanel line of fragrances available at Bonwit Teller, an upscale department store. The fragrance, of course, become a fave. An Andy Warhol subject and worn by everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve to Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, the perfume, is a foundational part of fragrance history… and still sells a bottle every 30 seconds.
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived”*…
The most under-rated of our senses is also the least understood. But as Yasemin Saplakoglu reports, a better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain…
… Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.
Smell is also our most ancient sense, tracing back billions of years to the first chemical-sensing cells. But scientists know little about it compared to other senses — vision and hearing in particular. That’s in part because smell has not been deemed critical to our survival; humans have been wrongly considered “bad smellers” for more than a century. It’s also not easy to study.
“It’s a highly dimensional sense,” said Valentina Parma, an olfactory researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “We don’t know exactly how chemicals translate to perception.” But scientists are making progress toward systematically characterizing and quantifying what it means to smell by breaking the process down to its most fundamental elements — from the odor molecules that enter your nose to the individual neurons that process them in the brain.
Several new databases, including one recently published in the journal Scientific Data, are attempting to establish a shared scientific language for the perception of molecular scents — what individual molecules “smell like” to us. And on the other end of the pathway, researchers recently published a study in Nature describing how those scent molecules are translated into a neural language that triggers emotions and memories.
Together, these efforts are painting a richer picture of our strongest memory-teleportation device. This higher-resolution look is challenging the long-held assumption that smell is our least important sense…
[Saplakoglu recounts the history of our understanding of smell; explains the current science on how millions of molecules, often in complex bouquets, enter the nose and are processed by neurons to generate a sense of smell that’s deeply emotional and personal; and explores the ways in which it’s intstrumental in attraction, survival, and memory…]
… Because our sense of smell can be largely subliminal, in surveys many people, given the choice of losing one sense, choose olfaction. But “every day, I experience people sitting in my office and talking about how they are disconnected to the world,” [Thomas] Hummel said. They can’t smell their children or spouses anymore. They cannot detect bad-smelling food or dangerous smoke. They no longer have access to certain memories.
“I know the memory is there, but I don’t have the key to open [it] anymore,” Hummel said. “Life becomes a much more insecure place without a sense of smell in many ways, but you only realize it when it’s gone.”…
Fascinating: “How Smell Guides Our Inner World,” from @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Helen Keller
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As we get to know the nose, we might celebrate the avatar of affecting aromas: today is National Cheese Pizza Day.
“Smells are the fallen angels of the senses”*…
In an excerpt from his new book, Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses, Ashley Ward contemplates the oft-ignored and much-maligned olfactory sense…
Despite the wonderful contributions that smell makes to our lives, it’s undervalued in modern Western societies. Polls conducted in both the US and the UK reported that of our five main senses, smell was the one that people were least concerned about losing, while a study of British teenagers found that half would rather be without their sense of smell than their phone.
Despite the wonderful contributions that smell makes to our lives, it’s undervalued in modern Western societies. Polls conducted in both the US and the UK reported that of our five main senses, smell was the one that people were least concerned about losing, while a study of British teenagers found that half would rather be without their sense of smell than their phone.
It may have to do with olfaction’s checkered past. For much of human history, smells were things to be wary of. The idea that sickness was borne out of noxious smells was the prominent theory in disease propagation for centuries. Clouds of pungency, known as miasmas, released from unclean dwellings, filthy streets, and even the ploughing of soil, were blamed for contaminating the body, leading to any number of maladies. A debilitating fever emerging from marshes and swamps was named after the medieval Italian for bad air: mal’aria. Terrifying epidemics that haunted the world for centuries seemed to be induced by foul, corrupted air.
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While odors themselves were regarded with distrust, it seems like every famous man in history who ever felt moved to write about our sense of smell had some derogatory point to make (there’s a notable shortage of opinions from the women of history). Most fall into one of two camps: those who regarded smell as relatively unimportant, and those who associated it with depravity. Plato considered that smell was linked to “base urges,” while others described it as degenerate and animalistic. Aristotle wrote that “man smells poorly” and Darwin asserted that “the sense of smell is of extremely slight service.”
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The migration of primate eyes to the front of the face allows excellent stereoscopic vision, compared to the side-of-the-head arrangement favored by many other mammals, but limits the space available for the olfactory equipment. The loss of the snout in apes especially seems only to further restrict the capacity for smell.
Finally, primates in general and humans in particular seem to be losing genes associated with our sense of smell. We have something like 400 working olfactory genes, but sitting in our genetic code are close to 500 olfactory pseudogenes. These are the genetic equivalents of fossils; genes that used to contribute to our sense of smell but that no longer work. In other words, we’ve lost over half of our smell genes across evolutionary time…
Eminently worth reading in full: “How Smell—the Most Underrated Sense—Was Overpowered By Our Other Senses,” from @ashleyjwward in @lithub.
* Helen Keller
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As we breathe in, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1943 that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the sensory- enhancing, even altering– that’s to say, psychedelic– properties of LSD. Hofmann had synthesized the drug five years earlier, but its hoped-for use in treating respiratory problems didn’t pan out, and it was shelved. On this day, he accidentally absorbed some of the drug through his skin (as he touched its container). He became dizzy with hallucinations. Three days later he took the first intentional dose of acid: 0.25 milligrams (250 micrograms), an amount he predicted to be a threshold dose (an actual threshold dose is 20 micrograms). Less than an hour later, Hofmann experienced sudden and intense changes in perception. He asked his laboratory assistant to escort him home and, as use of motor vehicles was prohibited because of wartime restrictions, they had to make the journey on a bicycle… which is why April 19 has been celebrated (since 1985) as “Bicycle Day.”
“If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better”*…
It’s official. Science has decided that old books smell “smoky,” “earthy,” and more than anything, “woody.”
That’s based on findings released today by Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič, researchers at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, who have been working to capture, analyze, and catalog historic and culturally important scents. The scientists collected the responses of visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter library in London, asking them to describe the smell and later compiling the results in a document they’re calling the Historic Book Odour Wheel…
Take a whiff at “The Odor ‘Wheel’ Decoding the Smell of Old Books.”
* Ray Bradbury
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As we breathe it in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1749 that George Frideric Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks— or Fireworks Music, as it’s commonly known — premiered in a specially-constructed theater in St. James park in London.
The display was not as successful as the music itself: the weather was rainy, and in the middle of the show the pavilion caught fire.
The ill-fated site of the premiere
“Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will”*…
Woodcut engraving from the mid-16th century depicting the process of distilling essential oils from plants with a conical condenser
Since ancient times, people have felt that eliminating the foul odors of human bodies and effluvia is an effective– indeed, in some times and cultures, the most effective– way to improve public health.
Consider the sweet, intoxicating smell of a rose: While it might seem superficial, the bloom’s lovely odor is actually an evolutionary tactic meant to ensure the plant’s survival by attracting pollinators from miles away. Since ancient times, the rose’s aroma has also drawn people under its spell, becoming one of the most popular extracts for manufactured fragrances. Although the function of these artificial scents has varied widely—from incense for spiritual ceremonies to perfumes for fighting illness to products for enhancing sex appeal—they’ve all emphasized a connection between good smells and good health, whether in the context of religious salvation or physical hygiene.
Over the last few millennia, as scientific knowledge and social norms have fluctuated, what Westerners considered smelling “good” has changed drastically: In today’s highly deodorized world, where the notion of “chemical sensitivity” justifies bans on fragrance and our tolerance of natural smells is ever diminishing, we assume that to be without smell is to be clean, wholesome, and pure. But throughout the long and pungent history of humanity, smelling healthy has been as delightful as it has disgusting…
The whole stinky story at “Our Pungent History: Sweat, Perfume, and the Scent of Death.”
* Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer [an amazingly good novel]
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As we hold our noses, we might spare a thought for Sir Joseph William Bazalgette; he died on this date in 1891. A civil engineer, he became chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, in which role his major achievement was a response to the “Great Stink of 1858,” in July and August 1858, during which very hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent. Bazalgette oversaw the creation of a sewer network for central London which addressed the problem– and was instrumental in relieving the city from cholera epidemics and in beginning the cleansing of the River Thames.
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