Febreze Commercials: Do We Really Want to Go Noseblind?

     Whenever I am asked to think about the sense of smell, Febreze commercials are consistently the first thing to pop into my head. Commercials for Febreze, an odor-eliminating spray, are predictable and clique, but for some reason they remain one of the only commercials I don’t completely hate. All Febreze commercials begin the same way: with a person sitting in a room minding their own business. Another person will enter the room, inhale deeply, then proceed to make a face of disgust. It is then revealed that the room is filled with some putrid smell that the first occupant has grown “noseblind” to. The person who is not noseblind will then spray Febreze all over the room and the two inhale deeply, deriving abnormally high levels of joy from the floral-scented chemicals.

     

     This concept of “noseblindness”, or the inability to perceive a scent that has been present in the air for a while, is intriguing to me. It seems as if we are constantly noseblind to almost everything around us. I never realized what my home smelled like until I returned from my first semester of college and was hit with the scent of tomato sauce and vinegar. A few years ago there was an unfortunate incident where I accidentally spilled peppermint essential oil on the floor of my bedroom. After a few minutes, I was no longer able to smell the peppermint, and thought the scent had gone away. I was surprised when both of my brothers were almost brought to tears by the strength of the smell and refused to even stand by my doorway. I’ve always viewed going noseblind as both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, there are certain smells, such as rotten eggs and burnt pancakes, that, as soon as they hit me, I can’t wait to go noseblind to. On the other hand, some smells are beautiful, and I don’t want to become acclimated to them. For me smells, even bad smells, make me happy; I usually pay such little attention to scent that being hit with a new smell feels like rediscovering an entire sense. Going noseblind temporarily rids the smeller of the joys of an entire sense.

     In Deborah Green’s book, The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature, Green discusses how modern day Western civilizations have deemed certain smells as “bad”, and would rather have no scent at all than  to be exposed to the odor. Green writes “Ultimately, our obsession with “bad” odors had led to the desire to create an environment with no scent at all.” This societal shift to value noseblindness has unfortunately seem to infiltrate our society. We have created a culture that only appreciates the aroma of baked goods and flowers. We are taught to not appreciate or acknowledge most scents, and given the impression that, in a world with many other ways of perceiving things, scent is irrelevant. But ignoring our sense of smell is ignoring an entire valuable part of this world. Scent is a sense that goes away as quickly as it came, but this class has shown me that I should observe and appreciate each scent I perceive as it comes, until I too grow noseblind to it.