The nose has it: It’s no surprise

If you do want to improve your sense of smell, just practise. And it’s amazing what you can achieve with practice

’ve spent 20 years learning to recognise different aromas; I make perfume for a living, and I run workshops to guide people around the world of fragrance. Apart from those whose sense of smell is irreparably damaged, we humans get better with practice pretty quickly. Even people who believe they have a terrible sense of smell are often good at it. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to read that, despite what many believe, human noses rival those of dogs and rodents.

Developing our sense of smell is similar to the way we get better at identifying sounds. If you haven’t listened to a lot of music, you’ll have a hard time spotting the difference between a clarinet and an oboe, mandolin or guitar, tabla or congas. As soon as you practise listening and see the instruments being played, you improve. Modern professional perfumers train at specialist colleges, smelling odourants on paper strips in thousands of combinations until they can identify hundreds of materials and nuances in quality. The rest of us can become good amateurs.

Our sense of smell isn’t for appreciating beautiful perfume; it’s for survival: Avoiding danger, assessing food and identifying people. Most of the time we think we aren’t smelling anything at all; we are, but not consciously. That’s because the brain switches off from the signals once it’s decided we’re safe, although the nose is still picking up aromas.

Lots of people ask me why their favourite perfume wears off so quickly. Usually it’s still there, but our brains don’t see any point in reminding us about it because it’s so familiar. It’s really tricky to convince someone that there is an aroma present even when they can’t smell it. When we step outside or into another environment our sense of smell checks for danger and food and reports in again; the scent appears to come back.

Working with fragrance every day, I’ve found that I can now smell aromas after untrained noses believe they’ve worn off. It seems that we can build up our scent stamina. If we’re tired we smell less accurately. At my studio, I make people take regular nose breaks, particularly if they’re new to perfume. People get what the ads call nose blindness — olfactory habituation — and if they can’t smell what’s on the paper strip, I’ll send them outside to try again. It’s our equivalent of “turn it off and on again”.

Aroma vocabulary

Unlike colour, there’s no chart to point to so that two people can compare similarities. We’re left with a classification of scent that only professionals and keen “perfumistas” learn, and our aroma vocabulary is restricted. In the urbanised, western world we struggle to describe scents. Last year, I made 25 attempts at a perfume for a client who told me she wanted something dark, deep and heavy. It turned out that she loved Body Shop White Musk — as light, sweet and fluffy as a scent can be, but she’d imagined that the word “musk” described the exact opposite.

One thing people are certain about is their ability to spot the difference between a natural and a synthetic aroma, but at my lab, they’re generally wrong. Sharply intense lime essential oil is one which 90 per cent of the people I’ve tested identify as smelling “chemical”. Synthetic but pleasantly smooth lime oxide is almost always identified as natural. Benzaldehyde, the synthetic smell of marzipan, is universally identified as natural, except by chemists and chefs who recognise it.

My neuroscientist mates tell me that stress inhibits the sense of smell too. At my studio, people who put themselves under pressure to create a fragrant masterpiece at their first attempt can suddenly go into a tailspin. A sit down and a nice cup of tea can restore it.

If you do want to improve your sense of smell, just practise. Pay more attention; smell the roses, the coffee, everything you eat and drink. If you smell something nice, stop and identify the source. You’re probably already better at it than you imagine — and perhaps at least as good as your four-legged friends. Sarah McCartney is a self-taught perfumer and founder of 4160 Tuesdays.