Scent
-
Scent of Museums
The scent of a museum is generally considered quiet, idealized and hermetic. Institutions try hard to create sterile moments for the visual and non-touchable to speak aesthetically without the intrusion of other senses (no touching! no smells! no voices please!). Regardless of old or new art, museums often smell like their audiences (often stale le…
-
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…
-
Smell Squiggles Breathe Life to Images
Universal visual squiggles can communicate direct, heretic qualities of smell – stink, stunk, smell and fragrance can be communicated with the deft wiggle or stroke of a pen. The wafteron (also spelled waftarom) is a simple technique used by comics illustrators to express the smell of something. Cartoonists that use wavy lines in this fashion make…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Play is the Highest Form of Research
In this installation we share the importance of play when creating, exploring, researching and making. When the landscape of smell is quickly crowded by expertise, institution or the market it’s an important reminder to invite fresh voices to the table and that true research and innovations begin firmly in play. The Odorbet is an open…
-
Fresh Plump Purses
A first galley proof of À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann with Proust’s handwritten corrections Marcel Proust (MP) has inspired much scholarly dialogue and armchair scholarly references around memory and scent and the nature of art. It’s worth reviewing other direct mentions of scent in his enormous volume “À la…
-
Amber for the Win!
This installation marks an important shift in the perfume industry, where an entire genre has been renamed out of respect for the fact that a term was outdated and derogatory. I commend colleagues, perfumers and writers for demanding a change, and doing so on no uncertain terms. This gesture by the industry insiders is hopefully…
-
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 