Making Sense Out of a Smell
When François Demachy smells lavender, he teleports to his childhood in the south of France. “The smell of lavender for me is a memory of very clean linens,” he told The Times. “My grandmother would whiten her sheets by putting them out on the grass to dry in the sun.”
As the man in charge of creating perfumes for Parfums Christian Dior, Mr. Demachy knows that smell activates our neurons as well as our nostrils.
“In order to remember a smell, because it’s so abstract, your brain has to remember everything around it: the place, the light, the colors, everything,” he said. “The smell is even in your brain. It’s very precise in your memory, much more so than any image.”
Some of us cannot help but smell in images.
“If you rented a villa in Tuscany, this is what it would smell like,” Anna Chlumsky, an actress, told The Times’s Alexis Soloski as she browsed a perfumery in New York.
“Which one smells more like the first female president?” she then asked as she wielded two bottles of cologne.
Ms. Chlumsky follows her nose, but advertising, packaging and price can lead us astray in the pursuit of the perfect scent.
Perfumarie, a new “meta- discovery studio” in New York, encourages blind perfume shopping. Fragrances are stripped of all branding and are available on tap labeled only by number.
“People need to learn how to be empowered to have a point of view and choose what they like for themselves,” Mindy Yang, the woman behind the store, told The Times.
Trusting our noses might be tricky, but it can add new layers to our sensorial experiences. The Danish chef Adam Aamann, for example, thinks of smell as an “extraordinary way of tickling people.” To achieve that, he personally designed the liquid soap in the restroom in his restaurant, Aamanns 1921, to complement his patrons’ culinary journeys.
Once customers have washed their hands using one of Aamann’s two handmade soaps, they return to the table with their hands smelling of the herbs that are being used in the kitchen. “If you use cedar oil, which is warm and spicy, it would go with herbs such as rosemary and thyme, or citric oils like bergamot,” Mr. Aamann told The Times.
The animal world interprets smell in different ways. The tiny mud crab is able to smell chemicals in the urine of the blue crab, which love to feast on its smaller cousin.
“They smell death around them, and if that death is of their own type, they want out of there,” Julia Kubanek, a marine chemical ecologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, told The Times.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is harnessing the nostrils of dogs to sniff out insects that eat through its exhibits’ textiles and wood, The Times reported. And The New England Journal of Medicine once wrote about a 2-year- old cat named Oscar that was better than most doctors at predicting when a terminally ill patient was about to die.
“No one knows how the cat acquired his formidable death-sniffing skills,” Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote in The Times.
Every time a scent meets our noses, it taps into the memories, fears and chemical reserves in our brains. An experienced perfumer like Mr. Demachy knows that creating a fragrance requires looking past the nose.
“You don’t make a perfume just by blending some raw materials,” he said. “No, you have to think before. You have to have one idea or know where you want to go.”