The Most Intimate Sense
“You can’t pick out a fragrance for someone else.”
That was what my mom told me in high school. It seemed to me that perfume was something all the grown-up women in my life used, so I figured it was time for me to get in on the action. I asked her if she would get me some perfume for my birthday and she refused. She told me that everyone has to pick their own fragrance. Perfume is generally a gift only received from a romantic partner because it is so intimate. Even then, a scent picked for you by someone else may never feel quite right because our scent is tied to our personality.
Scent is an incredibly intimate, personal sense. It starts with the simple nature of how it works; to smell someone, you must be close enough for their particles to reach your nose. There are very few people in one’s life that spend enough time in this close proximity to actually know someone else’s’ scent. We know the smells of lovers and sometimes family members, and maybe of a few close friends, but that’s it. We may laugh at Elizabethans’ “love apples,” but our practices are just as strange. When we wear our boyfriends’ shirts or develop a preference for our mothers’ lotion, we are doing the same humans were doing in the 1500s (and perhaps have always done). The way that scents of loved ones make us feel always has carried significance.
All smells have a feeling. Emotion, memory, and scent are intrinsically intertwined and can never be truly separated. Ackerman explains in her section on smell how our brains evolved from olfactory tissue, claiming that “we think because we smelled.” (20) Those emotions are hard to carry in a bottle. The feeling of anticipation brought about by the smell of an approaching thunderstorm, the feeling of excitement upon smelling mom’s muffins in the oven when we wake up, or the feeling of calm when smelling a field of grass on a warm day, can never really be captured by perfume. These kinds of smells are fleeting moments of bliss that can never be recreated. That is why we close our eyes and breathe deeply when we get home after travels or when we hug a loved one or when we pull cookies out of the oven. We focus only on our noses and try to savor the moment. The flip side of this is also true, however. People who get food poisoning, for example, can often never stand the smell of the food that caused it again. It doesn’t matter if it was their favorite food for their entire life; the smell is too close to the emotion and memory of illness.
Another reason that scent is such an intimate sense is that we unfortunately have very little control over what we smell. There is no equivalent to earplugs or covering our eyes or spitting out something that tastes bad when it comes to smell. Eventually we have to breathe. There is no defense for what we smell like there is for so many other senses.
Every creature on this planet has its own scent, and this smell carries massive amounts of information. From where we work to our immune systems to what we just ate, a well-tuned nose can gather this information with precision and efficiency. In addition to this, smells have immense power over our mood and memory. Our very brains exist because of scent. For these reasons, smell is perhaps the most intimate of our senses.
That was what my mom told me in high school. It seemed to me that perfume was something all the grown-up women in my life used, so I figured it was time for me to get in on the action. I asked her if she would get me some perfume for my birthday and she refused. She told me that everyone has to pick their own fragrance. Perfume is generally a gift only received from a romantic partner because it is so intimate. Even then, a scent picked for you by someone else may never feel quite right because our scent is tied to our personality.
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Scent is an incredibly intimate, personal sense. It starts with the simple nature of how it works; to smell someone, you must be close enough for their particles to reach your nose. There are very few people in one’s life that spend enough time in this close proximity to actually know someone else’s’ scent. We know the smells of lovers and sometimes family members, and maybe of a few close friends, but that’s it. We may laugh at Elizabethans’ “love apples,” but our practices are just as strange. When we wear our boyfriends’ shirts or develop a preference for our mothers’ lotion, we are doing the same humans were doing in the 1500s (and perhaps have always done). The way that scents of loved ones make us feel always has carried significance.
All smells have a feeling. Emotion, memory, and scent are intrinsically intertwined and can never be truly separated. Ackerman explains in her section on smell how our brains evolved from olfactory tissue, claiming that “we think because we smelled.” (20) Those emotions are hard to carry in a bottle. The feeling of anticipation brought about by the smell of an approaching thunderstorm, the feeling of excitement upon smelling mom’s muffins in the oven when we wake up, or the feeling of calm when smelling a field of grass on a warm day, can never really be captured by perfume. These kinds of smells are fleeting moments of bliss that can never be recreated. That is why we close our eyes and breathe deeply when we get home after travels or when we hug a loved one or when we pull cookies out of the oven. We focus only on our noses and try to savor the moment. The flip side of this is also true, however. People who get food poisoning, for example, can often never stand the smell of the food that caused it again. It doesn’t matter if it was their favorite food for their entire life; the smell is too close to the emotion and memory of illness.
Another reason that scent is such an intimate sense is that we unfortunately have very little control over what we smell. There is no equivalent to earplugs or covering our eyes or spitting out something that tastes bad when it comes to smell. Eventually we have to breathe. There is no defense for what we smell like there is for so many other senses.
Every creature on this planet has its own scent, and this smell carries massive amounts of information. From where we work to our immune systems to what we just ate, a well-tuned nose can gather this information with precision and efficiency. In addition to this, smells have immense power over our mood and memory. Our very brains exist because of scent. For these reasons, smell is perhaps the most intimate of our senses.
Nice post. I particularly liked how you connected your experiences with perfume to specific points that Ackerman made about smell in her book, and that you picked up on her point that because we breathe - we're always smelling, whether we want to or not. Thus, we're probably always sub- or unconsciously orienting ourselves by smell. While most other animals seem better at this than us humans, we have the capacity to "map" our spaces through smell, especially if our other senses are not working. Like Helen Keller. Do you mean by "most intimate" the smell is the most emotionally impactful of the the senses?
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