A Natural History of the Senses

by Diane Ackerman

  Can it be possible that human beings do this, too, without realizing it? We don’t require smell to mark territories, establish hierarchies, recognize individuals or, especially, know when a female is in heat. And yet one look at the obsessive use of perfume and its psychological effect on us makes it clear that smell is an old war-horse of evolution we groom and feed and just can’t let go of. We don’t need it to survive, but we crave it beyond all reason, maybe, in part, out of a nostalgia for a time when we were creatureal, a deeply connected part of Nature. As evolution has phased out our sense of smell, chemists have labored to restore it. Nor is it something we do casually; we drench ourselves in smells, we wallow in them. Not only do we perfume our bodies and homes, we perfume almost every object that enters our lives, from our cars to our toilet paper. Used-car dealers have a “new-car” spray, guaranteed to make a buyer feel good about the oldest tin warthog. Real estate dealers sometimes spray “cake-baking” aromas around the kitchen of a house before showing it to a client. Shopping malls add “pizza smell” to their air-conditioning system to put shoppers in the mood to visit their restaurants. Clothing, tires, magic markers, and toys all reek with scent. One can even buy perfume discs that play like records, except that they exude scent. As has been proven in many experiments, if you hand people two cans of identical furniture polish, one of which has a pleasant odor, they will swear that the pleasantly scented one works better. Odor greatly affects our evaluation of things, and our evaluation of people. Even so-called unscented products are, in fact, scented to mask the chemical odors of their ingredients, usually with a light musk. In fact, only 20 percent of the perfume industry’s income comes from making perfumes to wear; the other 80 percent comes from perfuming the objects in our lives. Nationality influences fragrances, as many companies have discovered. Germans like pine, French prefer flowery scents, Japanese like more delicate odors, North Americans insist on bold smells, and South Americans want even stronger ones. In Venezuela, floor-cleaning products contain ten times as much pine fragrance as those in the United States. What almost all nationalities share is the need to coat our floors and walls with pleasant odors, especially with the smell of a pine forest or lemon orchard, to nest in smells.

  A small shop on Third Avenue near Gramercy Park, like many such places throughout New York, sells a mélange of sensory delights. There are many pieces of Port Meiron china emblazoned with colorful, precisely detailed botanical drawings. Stationery and wrapping paper is all handmade, the woody fibers and imperfections thickly visible. Some are coarse-grained, with tutti-frutti splotches of color. The nose leads the way. Small bath-oil beads claim to smell like “Spring Rain” or “Nantucket.” What does Spring Rain smell like? It’s a popular scent. But would even the diehard sensuist know the difference between spring rain and, say, summer or fall rain? Appealing first to the imagination, it puts a picture of spring rain in the mind, then you inhale its sweet mineral essence and think, perhaps, of the red-capped lichens called “British soldiers” you discovered in the Berkshires when you were ten. Or remember the scent of rain on the olive-drab tent, and hear the rain falling on canvas like a thousand drumming fingers. Gramercy Park seems only a small eddy in time from those distant years. One shelf in the store is devoted entirely to environmental fragrances. “Use with our aluminum light bulb ring to perfume your living spaces” one of the packages explains. Parfum de l’Ambiance. Tint the air with scent, perfume what enters your nostrils, bathe in sweetness while you walk from one room to another, stir the fragrance by dancing.

  We seem unable to live in Nature without taking on its smells and wearing them as talismans, imagining we possess their ferocity, magnetism, or zest. On the one hand, we live in quarters sanitary and orderly, and if Nature should be rude enough to enter—in the form of a vole, fly, or termite crawling along the skirting boards, or a squirrel in the foundations, or a bat in the attic—we stalk it with the blood lust of a hunter. On the other hand, we insist on bringing Nature indoors with us. We touch the wall and make daylight flood a room, we turn a dial and it’s summer, we surround ourselves with a caravan of completely unnecessary outdoor smells—pine, lemon, flowers. We may not need smell to survive, but without it we feel lost and disconnected.

  ANOSMIA

  One rainy night in 1976, a thirty-three-year-old mathematician went out for an after-dinner stroll. Everyone considered him not just a gourmet but a Wunderkind, because he had the ability to taste a dish and tell you all its ingredients with shocking precision. One writer described it as a kind of “perfect pitch.” As he stepped into the street, a slow-moving van ran into him and he hit his head on the pavement when he fell. The day after he got out of the hospital, he discovered to his horror that his sense of smell was gone.

  Because his taste buds still worked, he could detect foods that were salty, bitter, sour, and sweet, but he had lost all of the heady succulence of life. Seven years later, still unable to smell and deeply depressed, he sued the driver of the van and won. It was understood, first, that his life had become irreparably impoverished and, second, that without a sense of smell his life was endangered. In those seven years, he had failed to detect the smell of smoke when his apartment building was on fire; he had been poisoned by food whose putrefaction he couldn’t smell; he could not smell gas leaks. Worst of all, perhaps, he had lost the ability of scents and odors to provide him with heart-stopping memories and associations. “I feel empty, in a sort of limbo,” he told a reporter. There was not even a commonly known name for his nightmare. Those without hearing are labeled “deaf,” those without sight “blind,” but what is the word for someone without smell? What could be more distressing than to be sorely afflicted by an absence without a name? “Anosmia” is what scientists call it, a simple Latin/Greek combination: “without” + “smell.” But no casual term—like “smumb,” for instance—exists to give one a sense of community or near-normalcy.

  The “My Turn” column in Newsweek of March 21, 1988, by Judith R. Birnberg, contains a deeply moving lament about her sudden loss of smell. All she can distinguish is the texture and temperature of food. “I am handicapped: one of 2 million Americans who suffer from anosmia, an inability to smell or taste (the two senses are physiologically related).… We so take for granted the rich aroma of coffee and the sweet flavor of oranges that when we lose these senses, it is almost as if we have forgotten how to breathe.” Just before Ms. Birnberg’s sense of smell disappeared, she had spent a year sneezing. The cause? Some unknown allergy. “The anosmia began without warning.… During the past three years there have been brief periods—minutes, even hours—when I suddenly became aware of odors and knew that this meant that I could also taste. What to eat first? A bite of banana once made me cry. On a few occasions a remission came at dinner time, and my husband and I would dash to our favorite restaurant. On two or three occasions I savored every miraculous mouthful through an entire meal. But most times my taste would be gone by the time we parked the car.” Although there are centers for treating smell and taste dysfunction (of which Monell is probably the best known), little can be done about anosmia. “I have had a CAT scan, blood tests, sinus cultures, allergy tests, allergy shots, long-term zinc therapy, weekly sinus irrigations, a biopsy, cortisone injections into my nose and four different types of sinus surgery. My case has been presented to hospital medical committees.… I have been through the medical mill. The consensus: anosmia caused by allergy and infection. There can be other causes. Some people are born this way. Or the olfactory nerve is severed as a result of concussion. Anosmia can also be the result of aging, a brain tumor or exposure to toxic chemicals. Whatever the cause, we are all at risk in detecting fires, gas leaks and spoiled food.” Finally, she took a risky step and allowed a doctor to give her prednisone, an anti-inflammatory steroid, in an effort to shrink the swelling near olfactory nerves. “By the second day, I had a brief sense of smell when I inhaled deeply.… The fourth day I ate a salad at lunch, and I suddenly realized that I could t
aste everything. It was like the moment in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when the world is transformed from black and white to Technicolor. I savored the salad: one garbanzo bean, a shred of cabbage, a sunflower seed. On the fifth day I sobbed—less from the experience of smelling and tasting than from believing the craziness was over.”

  At breakfast the next day, she caught her husband’s scent and “fell on him in tears of joy and started sniffing him, unable to stop. His was a comfortable familiar essence that had been lost for so long and was now rediscovered. I had always thought I would sacrifice smell to taste if I had to choose between the two, but I suddenly realized how much I had missed. We take it for granted and are unaware that everything smells: people, the air, my house, my skin.… Now I inhaled all odors, good and bad, as if drunk.” Sadly, her pleasures lasted only a few months. When she began reducing the dosage of prednisone, as she had to for safety’s sake (prednisone causes bloating and can suppress the immune system, among other unpleasant side effects), her ability to smell waned once more. Two new operations followed. She’s decided to go back on prednisone, and yearns for some magical day when her smell returns as mysteriously as it vanished.

  Not everyone without a sense of smell suffers so acutely. Nor are all smell dysfunctions a matter of loss; the handicap can take strange forms. At Monell, scientists have treated numerous people who suffer from “persistent odors,” who keep smelling a foul smell wherever they go. Some walk around with a constant bitter taste in their mouths. Some have a deformed or distorted sense of smell. Hand them a rose, and they smell garbage. Hand them a steak and they smell sulfur. Our sense of smell weakens as we get older, and it’s at its peak in middle age. Alzheimer’s patients often lose their sense of smell along with their memory (the two are tightly coupled); one day Scratch-and-Sniff tests may help in diagnosis of the disease.

  Research done by Robert Henkin, from the Center for Sensory Disorders at Georgetown University, suggests that about a quarter of the people with smell disorders find that their sex drive disappears. What part does smell play in lovemaking? For women, especially, a large part. I am certain that, blindfolded, I could recognize by smell any man I’ve ever known intimately. I once started to date a man who was smart, sophisticated, and attractive, but when I kissed him I was put off by a faint, cornlike smell that came from his cheek. Not cologne or soap: It was just his subtle, natural scent, and I was shocked to discover that it disturbed me viscerally. Although men seldom report such detailed responses to their partner’s natural smell, women so often do that it’s become a romantic cliché: When her lover is away, or her husband dies, an anguished woman goes to his closet and takes out a bathrobe or shirt, presses it to her face, and is overwhelmed by tenderness for him. Few men report similar habits, but it’s not surprising that women should be more keenly attuned to smells. Females score higher than males in sensitivity to odors, regardless of age group. For a time scientists thought estrogen might be involved, since there was anecdotal evidence that pregnant women had a keener sense of smell, but as it turned out prepubescent girls were better sniffers than boys their age, and pregnant women were no more adept at smelling than other women. Women in general just have a stronger sense of smell. Perhaps it’s a vestigial bonus from the dawn of our evolution, when we needed it in courtship, mating, or mothering; or it may be that women have traditionally spent more time around foods and children, ever on the sniff for anything out of order. Because females have often been responsible for initiating mating, smell has been their weapon, lure, and clue.

  PRODIGIES OF SMELL

  Just as there are people with distorted, failing, or nonexistent senses of smell, there are those at the other end of the olfactory spectrum, prodigies of the nose, the most famous of whom is probably Helen Keller. “The sense of smell,” she wrote, “has told me of a coming storm hours before there was any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws near my nostrils dilate, the better to receive the flood of earth odors which seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odors fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space.” Other individuals have been able to smell changes in the weather, too, and, of course, animals are great meteorologists (cows, for example, lie down before a storm). Moistening, misting, and heaving, the earth breathes like a great dark beast. When barometric pressure is high, the earth holds its breath and vapors lodge in the loose packing and random crannies of the soil, only to float out again when the pressure is low and the earth exhales. The keen-nosed, like Helen Keller, smell the vapors rising from the soil, and know by that signal that there will be rain or snow. This may also be, in part, how farm animals anticipate earthquakes—by smelling ions escaping from the earth.

  People dressing for a dinner party on a stormy night won’t need to use as much perfume, because perfume smells strongest just before a storm, in part because moisture heightens our sense of smell, and in part because the low pressure makes a fluid as volatile as perfume spread even faster. After all, perfume is 98 percent water and alcohol, and only 2 percent fat and perfume molecules. At times of low pressure molecules evaporate faster, and can waft from one’s body into the alcoves of a room at considerable speed. This is also true, even on sunny days, in high-elevation cities such as Mexico City, Denver, or Geneva, where barometric pressures are always low because of the altitude. The ideal time and place to overwhelm a restaurant with one’s new perfume would be at the 7,000-feet-high El Tovar Lodge, perched right on the sense-staggering edge of the Grand Canyon, when a storm is brewing.

  Helen Keller had a miraculous gift for deciphering the fragrant palimpsest of life, all the “layers” that most of us read as a blur. She recognized “an old-fashioned country house because it has several layers of odors, left by a succession of families, of plants, of perfumes and draperies.” How someone blind and deaf from birth could understand so well the texture and appearance of life, let alone the way our eccentricities express themselves in the objects we enjoy, is one of the great mysteries. She found that babies didn’t yet have a “personality scent,” unique odors she could identify in adults. And her sensuality expressed itself in smell—and explained an age-old attraction: “Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.”

  A FAMOUS NOSE

  Those people with the nimblest sense of smell often end up working for perfumeries; some, if they are also imaginative and daring, create the great perfumes. In a sea of flowers, roots, animal secretions, grasses, oils, and artificial smells, they must be able to remember thousands of ingredients available to a perfumer, and the alchemical ways to blend them. They need an architect’s sense of balance and a bookie’s cunning. These days, laboratories can mimic natural essences, which is just as well, since we don’t have reliable natural extracts of such flowers as lilac, lily of the valley, or violet. But to produce a persuasive rose oil may mean mixing five hundred ingredients. On Fifty-seventh Street off Tenth Avenue in New York City, International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. houses the best professional noses in the world. People in the business know the place simply as “IFF,” a prolonged if, almost a whiff, mecca for any company needing a smell. Although they create almost all of the expensive, lavishly advertised perfumes that appear in the department stores each season, and many of the flavors and smells we enjoy in everything from canned soup to kitty litter, they do their work anonymously. But they’re the ones who provided the smell for a golf magazine’s highly successful ad (peel away a paper golf ball and the smell of freshly mown grass surges up to your nostrils), as well as an amusement park’s “cave” odor, and the habitat smells of New Eng
land woodlands, African grasslands, Samoa, and other locales for displays in the American Museum of Natural History. Turning a fake Christmas tree into a Tyrolean pine forest in the mind of the inhaler is no problem. In fact, that’s one of their simplest tricks. They are sensuous ghostwriters, inventors of rapture, creating the gold-plated aromas that influence and persuade us, without our knowing it. Eighty percent of men’s colognes are created in their laboratories, and nearly that much of women’s. Though they refuse to name names, in their hallways glass cases display perfumes by Guerlain, Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent, Halston, Lagerfeld, Estée Lauder, and many others, to which they gave birth. Some of their noses point at computer consoles, others are at work in rooms cluttered with papers and bottles. To them falls the ultimate paradox of creating a perfume that, on the one hand, is innovative, fresh, and exciting, and, on the other, is not too brazen or bizarre, but acceptable to large numbers of people. Scent strips, or Scratch-and-Sniff strips, have made their work easier to share. Pick up a magazine these days, and you’ll be assaulted by pages that smell of a Rolls-Royce’s leather upholstery, or of lasagne, or even of a new perfume. Invented at 3M Corporation only a decade ago, the strips contain microscopic balls full of fragrance. When you scratch, or tear back the flap, the balls rip open and the scent rushes out. Giorgio was the first company to advertise their perfume with scent strips. Now it’s difficult to find a magazine that doesn’t smell. I have on my desk right now a collection of over forty scent strips advertising perfumes, with slogans—for Estée Lauder’s Knowing, “Knowing is all”; Liz Claiborne’s feminist “All you have to be is you” for her signature fragrance; Parfums Fendi’s “La passione di Roma,” in which a marble-cheeked young girl is caught passionately kissing a statue; Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium is minus any verbal slogan, but its accompanying photograph of a beautiful woman in a gold-lamé suit, lying half dead in an opium delirium on a bed of orchids, makes its own perverse statement. There are thirty odor evaluators at IFF, on call to smell about a hundred fragrances a day. One spring afternoon, I meet their brilliant nose Sophia Grojsman, a robustly alive, Russian-born woman. Her short black hair is held back with a navy-and-white-striped headband. Her blue eyeshadow vibrates over dark lively eyes; she wears bright red nail polish and a denim suit with silver zippers. For a world-class nose on a deadline she seems relaxed and alert at the same time, as she sprawls behind her cluttered desk, right in the middle of which is a small trio of the monkeys who represent see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil. Smell-no-evil doesn’t rate a monkey.