Scents & Smells

In a festive book exchange, I received a copy of Patrick Süskind's 'Das Parfum' (1985), translated from the original German by John E. Woods. Wow! I first read this book at 12 years old, and thrice more after that at various ages, and I was always creeped out. Since the book was sitting on the shelf, I read it again. It's still creepy. I haven't gotten around to watching the 2006 film directed by Tom Tykwer, featuring Alan Rickman and Dustin Hoffman, or the 2018 adaptation into a television series now showing on Netflix.

I was mesmerized by the horror. How do you even write about scents and smells? How should one describe them? Everyone's memory bank of scents is so varied! How do olfactory human functions translate into words? How do we capture the essence of a smell? A Roger Ebert review of the film in 2007 noted,

Not only does "Perfume" seem impossible to film, it must have been amost impossible for Patrick Suskind to write. How do you describe the ineffable enigma of a scent in words? The audiobook, read by Sean Barrett, is the best audio performance I have ever heard; he snuffles and sniffles his way to greatness and you almost believe he is inhaling bliss, or the essence of a stone. I once almost destroyed a dinner party by putting it on for "five minutes," after which nobody wanted to stop listening.

Then I came across Rachel Syme's 'How to Make Sense of Scents', published in The New Yorker on January 25, 2021. She begins the article with perfumes and scents, and her personal interest in them, as well as seeking on scent forums and discussion boards. Then she moved on to food smells and food science. 

We can't avoid topics around the pandemic right, so the writer also mused about smells wafting through 2020 via a surgical mask on the face, and of course, the lasting effects of COVID-19 patients and the recovered, who seem to have lost their sense of smell, and along with that, a zest for life. The loss of the sense of smell has been widely accepted as a symptom of those infected by the current strains of COVID-19. Smells can be misleading, and stirring, and evoking emotions and memories. Familiar smells can bring you back to a period in time, for better or worse, a chapter in your life that you thought you have closed, but not forgotten. 

The stupor can be systemic. Some people with covid-19 seem to have been afflicted with lasting anosmia—the loss of smell—and the effects go beyond missing the zest of a just-peeled orange or the salt of a sea breeze; they may report feeling depressed or adrift. Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurobiologist, recently told the Times that, while many think of scent as “an aesthetic bonus sense,” it is a vital link between people and their environment. Losing that link can be traumatic. “People’s sense of well-being declines,” Datta said. “It can be really jarring and disconcerting.” Perhaps anosmia feels so traumatic because smell is so personal, wrapped up with one’s own idiosyncratic narrative and memory. Spongy vanilla cake dunked in tea may have rocketed Marcel Proust backward into his pampered youth, but the whiff of madeleines will mean something entirely different—if it means anything—to you.

There're plenty of olfactory workshops in Singapore, scents and those food styling sessions. They all deal with smells, taste and flavors. Say, soap-making, candle-making, perfume-making, assembling floral-bouquets, et cetera. I'm not into scents and fragrances. I use them, but sparingly. Depending on the ratio of ingredients, scents can be an assault on my senses. Parfum, like essential oils, while they might not be offensive on the nose, they tend to make me feel ill and dizzy, or create an allergic reaction with their vapor. Because flowers and herbs. Ugh. I prefer scents like 'ocean', 'salt spray', baby powder, aloe vera, hiba wood, orange, lemongrass... the sorts. 

However, some scents make me feel positively nauseous the moment the reach my nose, especially food, for example, soybeans boiling in a pot, bakes in the oven (flour, butter and sugar being heated up), durians, desserts, cream and such such. I don't even like floral alcohol or beer. Hahaha. Hence I no like gin with strong floral notes; London Dry only, thanks. Cakes don't smell very good to me, particularly sponge and chiffon cakes. I'm not even fond of bananas and the stink that over-ripe bananas send out.

Scent studies were good for business, too. In recent years, the number of scented products for the home has exploded: where there was once just “lemon fresh” or “ocean breeze” dish soap, now there are hundreds of varieties, including “honeycrisp apple,” “sea salt neroli,” and “palmarosa wild mint.” One study predicted that the scented-candle business will net $4.22 billion by the end of 2024. You can now find candles that mimic the smells of Catholic Mass, a warm French baguette, a tomato vine in the hot sun, and a rotting bouquet inside a funeral home.

I've become very aware of scents used at home because of the dog. I don't put on strong scents when I take her out. I don't want her to be smacked in the face by a wave of crazy scents too overwhelming for her brain to process. "While we have about 6 million olfactory receptors, dogs have a staggering 300 million." She doesn't seem to react adversely to the calming mists, but I spray it on her bed linen in moderation. She smells us even before she sees us. Okay, she likely hears us too. But when she's older and slower, then she can only rely on her sense of smell. 

Putting on a mask each time I head out isn't a bad thing. That, and washing hands and keeping up with hygiene are the only things protecting me from being infected with any type of viruses. I would have to hope that my immune system is strong enough to be battling whatever that tries to invade it. Masking up also ensures that I don't have to smell other human beings. LOL I don't really like being in close proximity to strangers and smelling THEM, their skin, or their day-old oils in the hair, or whatever perspiration and stink on the clothes. However, I sneakily remove my mask for a few minutes when I'm at the beach, by the water or in the park. Those smells are gorgeous and literally uplifting. Being immersed in the sounds and smells of Nature always puts me in a good mood.  

Talking about smells can feel a little like talking about dreams—often tedious, rarely satisfying. The olfactory world is more private than we may think: even when we share space, such as a particularly ripe subway car, one commuter may describe eau d’armpit as sweet Gorgonzola cheese, another will detect rotting pumpkin, and a third a barnyardy, cayenne tang. What surprised me is that using phrases like “barnyardy, cayenne tang” is a perfectly valid, even preferred, way to write about nasal experiences. Many of the most seasoned perfume critics incline toward the rhapsodic, as do the would-be critics who gather on the Internet to wax eloquent about the things they’ve smelled.