Would you give up your sense of smell for your phone?
This was one of the questions in a recent study by Brown University Medical School assessing how much value we attach to our olfactory system. The participants ranked 'smell' as the least important of all the senses, and a significant proportion answered they would rather give up their sense of smell than their phone, (an easily replaceable commodity), their pets, and bizarrely 'their left little toe'.
Western culture has always valued the other senses (sight, sound, touch, and taste) above smell, and as far back as ancient Greece, Plato recorded his feelings about the eye and ear, and their superiority to the nose, and other philosophers agreed that our sense of sense is 'animal' and not 'human"‘.
David Moltz from the cult perfume brand D.S. & Durga talks about the future of perfume in this interview, he notes that for previous generations music was the dominant culture. Everyone knew what was in the charts, but now, 'The cultural touchstone of our generation is food', he lives in New York and says his peers are more likely to namecheck a hot new chef, than a band. He hopes for a future when scent can be a communal pleasure like food has now become.
As a Brit, I totally agree with this, my mother tells the story of my Italian uncle causing a stir eating anchovies, bitter black olives, and cooking espresso on the hob in my gran’s council house in the 1970s. My kids now consider olives as a part of their daily diet and I’ve got some coffee cooking on the stove as I type, so much has changed in one generation, we are all foodies now.
However, along with other scent obsessives, I imagine a future where we take our kids to pick out essential oils on a Saturday morning, just as we drag them to a gallery or a farmer's market to trial new-season tomatoes.
So before you swap your sense of smell for your phone - or your little left toe for that matter - I want you to consider an entire sense you are sleeping on, something in your tool kit you can hack to make every day more productive or pleasurable. You just need to know how to use it, and on a personal level, I want you to understand how you’re already manipulating your other four senses: sight, sound, touch, and taste.
A Sensory Diary
I want you to write a sensory diary for 24 hours. It can be dashed notes on your phone, or just employ a new awareness throughout the day.
From my experience as a perfume brand founder, the most engaged people who attend my Sensory Perfume Workshops are photographers, chefs, musicians, masseuses, or work in fashion or the visual arts. In other words: people who are already masters of one of the other senses, so find it easier to tap into their sense of smell because they live their lives with sensory purpose. I want you to consider what sense you lean into the most.
Sight:
Think about your morning so far: did seek out a view or even gaze at a vase of flowers? Who do you follow on Instagram? Do you get your dopamine hit from scrolling carefully considered images of interiors or fashion, or the chiseled jawline of Thimothée Chalamet? Maybe you planning your weekend around a new exhibition, or a visit to a museum: an entire building full of objects curated purely for your visual pleasure.
Did you choose clothes for their colour, print, or cut because they make you feel joyful/powerful/whimsical/productive? My previous career was as a fashion and beauty editor, I worshipped at the altar of aesthetics, and so did most of my friends and colleagues. I’ve even gone as far as to hatch a tongue-in-cheek theory with other 'fashion people' - those who live for the pop of a collar or the new cut of denim - that perhaps we’re just ‘happier than the general population’, because what is a mundane act for most (that of getting dressed) is a joyful daily game for us! To have the power to manipulate your senses and find joy in small daily acts is to possess a secret others miss out on.
Sound:
Did you work out today? Did you pick music that helped you feel motivated? Then you've hacked your sense of sound. Do you plan to see live music anytime soon? Will you push to the front of the crowd, craving the feeling in the pit of your stomach? Does a song help you do the dishes? Can you dissociate listening to a tangle of instruments and vocals, that when it ends you realize you have washed up without really noticing? Do you call a friend and just the sound of their voice makes you feel better? I seem to have a thing for musicians, I envy their obsession, how they have soundtracks for every occasion. But I don't have to work in the industry to know that listening to the sound of waves crashing is relaxing, or that songs can make me feel reflective or happy, I hack my sense of sound all the time and I bet you do too.
Touch:
Back to getting dressed, is it more important to you how clothes feel, than how they look? I have a friend who scours vintage stores for certain fabrics: she loves to be wrapped in silk and cashmere and wouldn’t dream of shopping online, she needs to caress the fabric first.
Are you a cold-water junkie, who lives for the luminous skin crawl you get after an icy dip? Did you stoke a cat today, or the velvet cheeks of a baby? Did you make love with your eyes closed so you could meditate on your sense of touch, spinning out the delicious feeling that only skin-on-skin can deliver? Do you need cold air on your cheeks to feel alive, or scalding bathwater on your body to feel relaxed? The pandemic cast an ugly light on our sense of touch making it a crime to squeeze a peach before you buy it or to run your hand down the icy metal of the station banister. I remember when my children were very small and I would feel ‘touched out’ by the end of the day from their little limbs hanging off my body. Like any of the senses, touch can get overloaded, but I imagine that without the feeling of human skin, or the comfort of soft blankets and hot water, life would be very hard. Perhaps it’s the most important of all the five to keep topped up.
Taste:
What food or drink are you looking forward to later, and very specific feeling you know you will get from it? Maybe it’s beige ‘comfort food’ - a term that demonstrates how much we lean into this sense to manipulate our feelings. Maybe it’s something celebratory: a sea shimmer of oysters to induce euphoria or a ‘barnyardy’ glug of good red wine that’ll send the night down a decadent and dangerous path. I am a slave to my sense of taste and discuss with my partner in bed that morning, what we will eat that night. We regularly plan our weekends around picking up a certain cheese, spice, or pastry from an ethnic supermarket or specialty food store. I smuggle fish packed in oil and local bread into my luggage when I travel. I’ve recently got completely hooked on loose teas: rose Earl Grey, cardamon hibiscus, and spicy chai - it’s the perfect bridge between taste and smell, and has fast become a highlight in my day. Could you imagine a life lived without your sense of taste?
Now, consider how you’ve indulged your sense of smell today:
Perhaps you sniffed the coffee before you scooped it into the French press? Or were you too rushed to sit with the cherry notes and notice their nuances? Maybe you spritzed a perfume before you ran out the door. The same flacon of aroma chemicals you’ve worn for years, that you can’t even smell anymore. Maybe you used a lemon shower gel that you chose for its zippy notes, or perhaps you just grabbed the one with the chicest packaging in the supermarket.
Did you walk past a bakery and register vanilla or cinnamon? How did it make you feel? I’ll guess that if anything invoked your sense of smell today, it wasn’t intentional, you didn’t use it to control and aid your day, it just happened to you.
We have five senses to manipulate, and we ignore one of them. Imagine living a truly sensory life, each hour enhanced to the max, as productive and as beautiful, and potent as it could be. That will only happen when we grab hold of all five senses and learn how to harness them for good, and following this newsletter: Making Sense of It All is your first step.
love this xx