Perfume

Megan Volpert

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501367151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Our sense of smell is crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food. Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive bottle of perfume at a high-end department store. Perhaps it reminds us of our favorite aunt. A memory in a bottle is a powerful thing. Megan Volpert's Perfume carefully balances the artistry with the science of perfume. The science takes us into the neurology of scent receptors, how taste is mostly smell, the biology of illnesses that impact scent sense, and the chemistry of making and copying perfume. The artistry of perfume involves the five scent families and symbolism, subjectivity in perfume preference, perfume marketing strategies, iconic scents and perfumers, why the industry is so secretive, and Volpert's own experiments with making perfume. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 Science

Perfume is a colorless green idea that sleeps furiously. That’s a Chomsky joke. “Colorless” and “green” are contradictory, yet an object such as a green glass window or a soap bubble can simultaneously capture both ideas anyway. Sleep is a verb, a nesting doll hosting presumptively good choices for adverbs such as “calmly” and “peacefully,” and so sleep appears to inherently reject the prospect of a furious state. Yet one might thrash around in the night or dream very lucidly, sleeping in a manner that is indeed furious. The sentence itself, this assertion about perfume, is perfectly cogent.

In 1957, Noam Chomsky noticed that a sentence conveying utter nonsense can remain grammatically correct. His example: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” What a gorgeous sentence. Our lived experience of “green” or “sleep” cannot quite align with our ostensibly objective definition of those words. According to this transformational theory of grammar, surrealism is alive and well. Paradoxical things are imbued with vitality not in spite of our language rules, but because of the very verve of them.

Perfume has always seemed to me to be exactly this type of oddity. Our brains do a magic trick with smells that is much like the one they do with words: in the jumble of nouns and adjectives and other parts of speech, our brain looks for patterns in word order that help to build a meaning. Sometimes a very classic and rigidly comprehensible structure like Chomksy’s example sentence turns out to generate the wildest bit of pure poetry.

A violet is too delicate to undergo scent extraction directly from its raw natural material, but fortunately, nail polish remover (acetone) plus lemongrass (citral) divided by battery acid (sulfuric acid) equals the smell of violets (beta-ionone). That’s actually science, a chemist’s ability to mix molecules together until they form a structure the nose finds indistinguishable from the complex natural formula of a violet.

Specific clumps of molecules are the building blocks of perfume. The nose delivers these to our brain, which then tries to make sense of them. The brain recognizes a flower molecule it received, as well as a molecule that is smoky and animalic. Maybe the animal is unspecific. Consider the extent to which blindfolded people might have difficulty identifying a cow versus a horse by smell alone. So the information from these molecules up one’s nose is freely associating several concepts one’s brain has stored from past experience, bringing a few of them together in a totally new relationship, a hallucination that is the scent equivalent of language syntax. The brain organizes these molecules into the best meaning it can: a rose made of leather, clear as day, though our eyes have never seen it in material form. We have seen it in scent, sleeping furiously in its green and colorless way across our mind’s eye.

We know a fair amount about how the mind reads words and shockingly little about how it translates smells. And yet, smells are just molecules, and we know almost everything about molecules. We even know that only five types of atoms are typically involved in smelly molecules: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. These atoms connect together into molecules, and after those molecules fly up one’s nose, science doesn’t have much to say about why one’s brain reports back with images like the rose made of leather. The rose and leather scents are not objective properties of a molecule just like color is not an objective property of light wavelengths. The challenge lies in figuring out how our biology recognizes these signs from outside itself. A smell is a kind of feeling we have when the cells inside our nose touch certain molecules.

These cells are smell receptors, discovered in 1991 by Linda Buck. A molecule is like a puzzle piece that locks into a receptor. It might be like playing with a kid’s toy, where one can’t shove the triangle block into the square hole. There’s also the question of chirality, or mirror-image molecules, which is like asking whether the triangle block will fit into the triangle hole three different ways as one rotates it. Perhaps a receptor could pick up a smelly molecule and its opposite, except that the structural oppositeness of two molecules doesn’t correspond to their smells. Neither does structural similarity.

An awesome thing about the nose is that it’s basically a helmet covering the outermost portion of one’s brain. There are hundreds of smell receptors covering millions of olfactory neurons. This clump of neurons is known as the olfactory bulb. This bulb is the only part of the brain that pokes out through one’s skull, blowing in the breeze of one’s nostrils and gathering the backdraft from one’s mouth. The bulb collects info about the smelly molecules and sends this info to parts of the brain governing sensory perception but also to the parts governing memory and emotion, including the amygdala and the hippocampus.

The amygdala, responsible for one’s fear and anger, is usually characterized as the reptile part of the brain. It bolsters our survival instincts or what psychologists call the id. The hippocampus is responsible for executive functions like learning, mapping and remembering. So perfume not only immediately touches the literal brain, but also offers information that proliferates more broadly across multiple segments of the brain in ways that other sensory inputs like touching or seeing do not. Rodents have about a thousand kinds of smell receptors, while humans have less than half that number. With our measly four hundred receptors, humans have an easier time of identifying differences between two smells rather than what they have in common. It’s commonly understood that human noses don’t know as much as those of other animals.

Perhaps this is why science has left so much about smell unstudied. We already know we don’t get top marks compared to a lot of other species, so the entire faculty of smelling is demoted as less than civilized. We invent things to close the gap, for example carbon monoxide detectors to sniff out the deadly gas that could otherwise poison us. Aromachology and aromatherapy are denigrated as less than rigorously data-driven, as bunk science despite their two thousand or so years of contribution not only to survival but to civilization. Inventions like Little Tree car air fresheners or Febreze odor eliminating spray may not seem like high art, but they are not useless or dismissible creations.

There’s a television commercial for odor-eating Febreze featuring a very visibly stinky apartment full of piles of trash and dirty socks and so on. After some Febreze is sprayed into the room, people are led in blindfolded to report that it smells wonderfully fresh and clean. Take off the blindfold and the eye would disagree with the nose. It’s a contradiction that proves the product will work to mask unpleasant smells. Whether covering the smell of dirty underclothes is a worthwhile scientific mission is a matter of opinion, but the profit potential for a product resulting from such a mission is undeniable. So smell science continues to gravitate toward types of research that are most likely to make money.

This begs the question of how much one would pay for an improved sense of smell. There are a variety of medical conditions describing impacts on the capability of one’s nose that fall under the general heading of parosmia: inability to detect a full range of scents. Cacosmia: detecting an unpleasant odor around everyday things that do not actually possess an unpleasant odor, for example due to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or schizophrenia. Phantosmia: hallucinating “ghost” scents where none are actually present, for example due to traumatic brain injury, epilepsy or multiple sclerosis. Hyperosmia: heightened and usually overwhelming sensitivity to odors, for example due to hormones, genetics or migraines. All culminating in anosmia: an inability to smell.

The consequences of such conditions are as quantifiably vague as they are qualitatively obvious. One needs to be able to smell the leftovers in the fridge to know whether they’ve gone bad or can still be eaten. This is a matter of survival, yes, but also a bedrock of the enjoyment we take in the world. Imagine never knowing what a pizza smells like. Or perhaps worse, imagine having once known what a pizza smells like but now it smells like literal poop, or it can’t be smelled at all. Parosmia of any kind can radically reduce one’s quality of life by limiting feelings of belonging, and the social isolation can be depressing or debilitating. Imagine not knowing whether one needs to hop in the shower, or where exactly the dog peed on the carpet again, or how one’s house is permeated with the scents of a big family dinner at Thanksgiving.

It’s estimated that more than half of these conditions are due either to head trauma or to upper respiratory tract infection. Now is a good time to say that this book was written almost entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Early in spring of 2019, scientists told us that losing one’s sense of smell was a common symptom of coronavirus. A year later, we would learn that this absence often persists among so-called long-haulers as one of the most pernicious lingering consequences. Because I had to go into a packed classroom to do my essential work as a teacher at a time well before the vaccine, when the nature and extent of transmissibility was mostly unknown, I scented my face masks with violet and mint to help stave off panic attacks about health and safety. Bacon-scented face masks were a fad for a while. Suddenly everyone was aware of not only each other’s physical space for social distancing, but also the basics of aerobiology—droplets, aerosols, the lack of borders or privacy in our airspace. Dogs trained to sniff out ovarian cancer or tuberculosis were retrained and deployed in the Helsinki airport as an experimental alternative to rapid coronavirus testing. Noses were top of mind for once. My own nose was among the thousand things I worried about, along with whether the research for this project would be compromised if I caught the dreaded virus.

I was once temporarily anosmic and trying to remember how it felt still creeps me out bigtime. Some years ago, after a particularly overindulgent field trip to the fragrance counters of a major department store, I ended up with a bad migraine that cost me my entire sense of smell for about forty-eight hours. During that horrifying but thankfully brief window of time, I ate a lavish home-cooked meal that a friend had spent several hours preparing. All I can say about it is that most of the food was warm, there was a variety of textures, and it all looked great on the plate. When we believe we are tasting something, about seventy percent of the data our brain receives is actually based on smell. This is why pinching one’s nose helps bitter medicine to go down. To this day, the chef doesn’t know I couldn’t smell or subsequently really taste any of it, as if this revelation would somehow have been an embarrassment to both of us. And I remain sad that a terrific meal was lost upon me while I was transitorily dysfunctional.

As an antidote to my fear that if I lost my sense of smell I’d be unable to complete this book, I bore in mind that the best restaurant in America was run by a chef who had lost his sense of smell. Grant Achatz, of the Chicago molecular gastronomy temple Alinea, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer on his tongue in 2007. He thought he would have to cut it out, thereby forever surrendering most of his ability to smell and taste as well as imperiling his reputation as a rising culinary star. Instead, he went in for several months of aggressive radiation and chemotherapy, and he was cured without the major surgery. Yet he continued to design highly experimental and precise menus throughout the window of time where he had no genuine ability to evaluate the foundational aspects of his own compositions. It led him to new ways of thinking about color, texture and other elements of food preparation, as well as strengthening bonds between the team members whose judgment was necessarily subbed in for his own. Chef Achatz got to keep his tongue and eventually rebounded from his anosmia.

February 27^th is Anosmia Awareness Day. Because the condition is invisible, many people underestimate the extent to which it disables. Anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure for activities that are usually found enjoyable, for example trying new restaurants, cuddling with someone who is wearing perfume or going for a hike in the woods. Imagine loss of appetite, loss of romance, loss of peace of mind. So much do we forget how our noses make adventure, so much do we take our sense of smell for granted, that it can be challenging to work up empathy for those who suffer from parosmia. It takes a village of neurologists, physiologists, biologists, geneticists, chemists, and psychologists working in their diverse disciplines to weave together some semblance of comprehension and compassion for parosmics. The world’s only independent non-profit institute for advancing discovery in taste and smell is the Monell Center in Philadelphia, which houses about fifty interdisciplinary scientists. There are also a few small groups focusing on publicity, education and resources like the Anosmia Foundation in Canada and Fifth Sense in the United Kingdom.

The world lacks a celebrity spokesperson for the cause. The English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, had no sense of smell. Actor Bill Pullman lost his sense of smell after an accident during a stage performance where he fell fifteen feet, hit his head, and was in a coma for several days. He sometimes does advocacy work with the Monell Center. Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, has no sense of smell. His corresponding lack of tasting ability caused him to focus on the texture of ice cream more than the flavor, and this is why the vast majority of the brand’s products feature big chunks and syrup swirls. Cohen doesn’t like for any spoonful to be simply smooth.

If we are what we eat and seventy percent of eating is engaging with smells, then it is fairer to say that we are what we smell. The fact that most of eating and drinking is about fragrance rather than flavor generates some intriguing philosophical propositions. Consider whether one can taste something by only smelling it. This runs the gamut from pizza to sewage, the question of whether one is tasting these each time one walks by a pizza parlor or a public restroom. And smells are of course not uniformly perceived. Roses called by o ther names may not deliver the same sweet scent, in the same way red velvet cake doesn’t seem to taste like chocolate cake. These two cakes are ninety percent identical in the practical realities of baking and taking a bite, yet their symbolic relationship is as dumbly fraught as the relationship between chocolate and vanilla. Chocolate is composed of about seventy percent vanilla, so spending too much time on parsing the allegedly objective aspects of flavor or fragrance turns out to be an absurd enterprise. Chocolate and vanilla are characterized as definitional opposites, yet chocolate is living the paradox of being made mostly of vanilla.

The rational failure of this metaphor is oddly sensible in practice, like the surrealism of Chomsky’s colorless green ideas, and it’s easy to make the leap from food to perfume. Scientific principles—like experiment, trial and error, hypothesis, adjustment based on data, final product—apply to cooking and thereby also to food criticism or restaurant reviews. I came by my own scent vocabulary very much through the language of food. This language is accessible to anyone because everybody sniffs in the same way that everybody eats. Fragrance is as much a daily inevitability as flavor. We used to use perfume internally as well as externally and the basic plants-water-alcohol nature of perfume sits midway along the spectrum between a cup of tea and a cocktail. Modern tea masters and sommeliers would agree that most food science concepts have some parallel in perfumery and one’s background knowledge of food can easily be the launchpad to a love of perfume.

Jeffrey Steingarten, also known as the meanest judge from the Food Network’s Iron Chef America reality television competition show, often uses scent as the entry point for his critiques. He’s always leaning over plates for a big inhale and did once turn his attention directly to perfume in the pages of Vogue magazine. This was to amusingly denigrate a moment in the early Nineties when pheromones became all the rage because a California company by the name of Erox released a pair of fragrances called Realm. Most animals communicate with the chemical scent trails known as pheromones because they don’t have other language. There is not overmuch evidence to suggest humans relate to each other based on pheromones, other than the possibility that it causes menstrual cycle syncing in women’s college dormitories. Nevertheless, Realm offered a fruity floral and an aromatic, fern-like fougère that vaguely claimed to lure the opposite sex by means of science.

Twenty years of meager market share later, the internet yields not one single anecdote from anybody attributing their happy coupledom to Realm. The merchandise in the Clovers’ 1959 hit, “Love Potion No. 9,” remains mythic. There is not yet any reasonable evidence that the vomeronasal organ wedged inside our noses performs the pheromone reception functions it performs in other animals. A corresponding myth is that humans have a poor sense of smell compared to other animals. It’s true we have fewer receptors, but we are about average with other large mammals. Our brains also have more robust computation capacity for interpreting odors than many other animals do. The idea that humans are weak in the nose proliferated during the nineteenth century, when neuroanatomist Paul Broca cut open a skull, measured our organs, and declared that humans have proportionally smaller olfactory bulbs than a lot of other species. When Sigmund Freud picked up on this one guy’s supposition that surely size matters, lack of sniffing skills got bundled into the total package of human anxiety and it threw a damper on proper scientific exploration of our sense of smell for a century.

Yet perhaps our lived experience alongside other animals makes Broca’s unsubstantiated conclusions feel right. Don’t wear perfume on a hunt because it spooks the deer. Don’t leave a single crumb in the darkened corner of a cabinet because a mouse will surely sniff it out. Sharks can smell their food underwater. Bears can smell fear.

The most common data we collect in everyday life pertains to dogs: our companion animals are always snuffling at something or oth...