Science
-
On the Nose: What to Learn from Funk and Fragheads
Happy grad season!! This Odorbet word selection is by Alexandra Segal*, Wesleyan University class of 25, who recently wrote her undergraduate anthropology thesis on perfume and queerness. It received both High Honors and the 2025 Gay, Lesbian, and Sexuality Studies (GLASS) Prize for best research and writing in the field. Alexandra grew up in Los…
-
Leonardo & Perfume Rennaissance Recipes
(Image 16th-century censers, Blois Cathedral © Léonard de Serres) In a museum which was once the living and dying chambers of Leonardo De Vinci, Château du Clos Lucé in central France, there is an exhibition exploring scent during the time of this Rennaissance man and parenthetically his mother “Catarina’s” life. The exhibition press materials share that his…
-
The Nose and Our Evolutionary Impulse: Sex, part two
As a clinical mental health therapist I spend a lot of time trying deeply not to pathologize normal behavior in one breath, and trying to research biological and science-based clues to our social and emotional functioning to make a case, make sense of or dissolve a diagnosis. I work with adolescents often, and this is…
-
To Smell a Rat
Apologies to the powerful rodent that likely outnumbers the humans in Manhattan, but there is a case of rat smelling in the scent world. There are many people and practices doing unsavory things, and most will remain quietly existing forever as the rats do in the city. Much like rat sightings increasing 71% in the…
-
A Curious Case of Nosebo
What you put your attention on grows stronger. – anonymous Image artwork courtesy Catherine Haley Epstein Our minds are literal judgement factories, we create hundreds of thousands of judgments a day including a host of “good, “bad”, “safe”, “dangerous”, “great ,“horrible”, all in the name of self-preservation. Some of us realize due to serious introspection…
-
2,337 Year Old Nose Musings
One of the more humbling features of human knowledge is the fact that despite our belief in progression, innovation and savvy, voices from 2,337 years ago often feel more relevant now than ever. Especially regarding the mysteries of being human, of consciousness and our sense that gives us the most pause: the olfactory. I dipped…
-
Digiscents & Noble Prize in Olfaction
“You don’t want to just do a problem because it’s easy to solve, you want to do something that you’re obsessed with, that you just have to understand, because that’s where the joy comes from, and that also, I think, is where the great discoveries come from, for people are really trying to try to…
Odorbet 