Gimmie those good smells

I walked into my office bleary eyed on a Monday morning to see a trail of ants on my desk and a clump of them whirling around on the floor. How, why? Less than 24 hours ago I saw not one. In a fit of anger and shame, I mushed all of them with tissues. I was invaded last year and I knew how to get rid of straglers: with smells. I spread cloves all around the perimeter of my office and unleashed an ant deterrent—a sachet reeking of lemongrass—in the small room. If those didn’t work, I had a vial of peppermint oil ready to deploy. Humans find peppermint invigorating but ants are supposedly repelled. 

The cloves and lemongrass did the trick and the ants have been gone for weeks now.

The lesson: smell is powerful. (I had to work from the living room the day I smell-bombed the ants). We don’t give our sniffers enough credit. Humans can smell 5 million different molecules, which is less than a dog but way more than what bet I you were thinking. Smell helps connect us to the world around us on some deep, animalistic way. We’re just not aware of it most of the time. There’s a story in my family of how my mother smelled gas in our home, called the gas people, who detected nothing with their science instruments. My mother insisted she smelled gas and finally, using dish soap applied to a pipe, they saw the bubbles that showed them what my mom knew all along: there was a gas leak. This is an extreme case, but this sense alerts us, gives us signals to what’s going on in our environment. Our nose knows when there’s spoiled milk and moldy food in the fridge, when that sweatshirt needs to be washed, when it’s going to rain, when the grass has been cut.

Can you imagine not having a sense of smell? I can’t. (Even with really bad colds, I could still smell; it was just muted). Besides the variety of environmental cues smell provides, it can also be mood altering. I remember once, in the Before Times, feeling anxious in a grocery store and going over to the soaps and randomly picking up the ones that sounded interesting (French lavender, some bergamot concoction) and after a minute or two, the anxiousness dissipated into calm.

English is a crappy vehicle for describing smell. This fascinating New York Times Magazine articles points out how use proxy words to describe smell. A scent is like something else. It’s not a thing in itself, like colors. The only exception I can think of is petrichor since it is that particular smell of the air after a rain following a dry spell. But try to describe the scent of a rose, of a forest, of what you ate last night. It’s hard.

I wonder if this is why descriptions of an aroma can get crazy (think of those florid wine descriptions!) because in order to describe it, you have to reach for other words: “Baked apples with cinnamon left to cool on the window sill of a cabin in a forest on a foggy spring morning, near a bush of roses ” sounds actually quite nice to experience but a bit unhinged when it comes to describing a smell, wine or otherwise. What’s funny is I don’t know if these descriptions even work all the time. There’s so much mashed together. What the hell do baked apples, fog, forest, roses, smell like together? On the other hand, really interesting, evocative scents (wines, perfumes, memories) have so much going on that I wonder if we need these ridiculous descriptions in order for our own personal brains to make sense of it?

But with smell, it also goes beyond just trying to convey what your nose picks up. Smell is deeply connected to how we think and feel about a thing. It triggers emotions and memories as mysterious as our beating hearts. It is, your grandmother baking cookies, that cool spring day you sat outside drinking cocktails with your friends, a Florida beach on spring break. Describing a smell can be a deeply personal thing that can make it hard for someone else to get it in the way you do.

I’ve recently gotten back into perfumes (I’m ordering sample sets every week) and this is why it’s fun to talk about perfumes, and scented things in general, with other people. We can interpret them so differently and scented products can smell so differently on us. Smell is personal: how our bodies react to the scent, how we think about it, what it reminds us of, if we find ourselves so captivated that we are still thinking about that one scent nine months after we first tried it.

Or maybe we’re not consciously thinking of any particular scent at all, we’re just going about our business, and then boom, we smell it and we’re right back in that memory.

I’d love to hear your favorite scents or scent memories! If you’re into perfumes (if not, consider it, it’s fun!) here’s three perfumers who are creating awesome stuff: Imaginary Authors, Ineke, and Zoologist. Or if you want a monthly sample pack of a variety of different perfumes, checkout Olfactif.

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