The subjectivity of smells

Smell has always been interesting to me as one of the most difficult senses to communicate to others. Clearly this is a nearly universal feeling. In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman begins the very first chapter by emphasizing that smell is "the mute sense". We can clearly describe what something looked like and some of us are even able to reproduce that through drawing. How something felt can also be clearly described, and even how something sounded can most often be put into words. Taste is the most similar to smell in that it is almost always described using other tastes that we already know, but when describing a taste there are many tastes nearly everyone knows and can compare to. This is not true for smell. Sure, there are certain things that most people know the smell of, but they are difficult to pin down and relate to other smells. We can say something smells like citrus, but when asked to be more specific it gets very hard

For me one most fascinating things about smell is how hard we have tried to communicate this in media such as film. I remember hearing years ago about a special "4D" movie theater that tried to include smell in its movies by releasing specific scents at particular times during the movie. I assume it was not that successful, as I don't remember hearing anything else about it. I personally cannot think of any way to improve their design. Perhaps people are not that interested in introducing smell into the movie watching experience. This strikes me as odd, since smells are such an important part of the stories and memories that we have in our own heads. One possible reason for this is how subjective smells are. Peoples' opinions on many smells vary wildly. I know I hate the sickly sweet vanilla air freshener my sister uses in the car every time she drives it. Maybe once we have virtual reality figured out we will be able to introduce smells, but I think it will be one of the last senses that we figure out how to simulate in an appealing way.