The Science of Scent: A Feast for the Nose

How do we smell? Where do perfume ingredients come from and how has this changed throughout the ages, as science and technology have advanced? How many scented materials are there in the world and how many of them do we remember? And what about the highly skilled people who concoct these amazing scents and potions? Are perfumers born with better noses than the rest of us?

The Science of Scent is a fascinating event which explores the fundamentals of olfactory science and perfumery. The two-hour evening, hosted on November 19 by the Royal Institution of Great Britain and sponsored by Procter & Gamble, will open with an introductory session on the history and science of all-things-smelly and culminate in an interactive workshop which offers guests the opportunity to sample and mix their own compositions under the guidance of an experienced perfumer.

As the already-aromatic event includes odour evaluation, guests are requested to refrain from wearing any overpowering scents of their own.

A Sensa-ble Diet Plan

Chapter 12 of Whiff! relates a remarkable theory proposed by Steven Landau, founder of Scentsational Technologies, as to the recent explosion of obesity in America: “In the old days, moms would cook more often, so a home would typically be filled with aromas for hours on end. This, he asserts, helps to lend a feeling of satiation to the appetite before the meal. Now that the major sources of a family’s food supply are microwavable meals and fast food, aromas aren’t floating around the house inducing satiety. Therefore we are eating more today before we feel satisfied.”

It’s a fascinating idea with an unmistakable ring of common sense. So, why hasn’t the multi-million dollar diet industry latched on with a product geared toward staving our cravings through our nasal passages?

Enter, Sensa, the first weight-loss aid designed to satisfy our appetites by satisfying our noses. “Sensa works with your sense of smell to curb your hunger without affecting the taste of your food,” explains Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago and creator of Sensa. “This induces something called ’sensory-specific satiety.’ It makes your brain perceive that you’ve eaten more than you have and, thus, you eat less and lose weight.”

Each Sensa Shaker has two sides, one sweet foods (fruit, pastries, cereal) and one for salty (meat, pasta, vegetables, popcorn), and is applied to food much like salt or pepper. And how does Sensa perform against traditional diet aid products? A clinical study concluded last June by Hirsch and colleagues charted the progress of nearly 1500 people who used the sprinkles on everything they ate for a period of six months, with no other changes in diet or exercise routine. “We found an average weight loss over six months of 30 1/2 pounds.”

Cut & Run or Duck & Cover?

When a lab experiment at CREATE Charter School in Jersey City went awry last Tuesday, an odorless vapor set off fire alarms and prompted evacuation of the facility. The Jersey City Fire Department was the first agency to respond, and it called in its Hazmat Unit when it learned the nature of the alarm.

Consider for a moment that last sentence: The Jersey City Fire Department was the first agency to respond, and it called in its Hazmat Unit when it learned the nature of the alarm. Emergency response teams could not have immediately known the “nature of the alarm,” let alone the students, because their warning came in the antiquated form of the one-sound-fits-all Read more

Roll-On Deodorant for the Home

As noted in Whiff!, the idea of scenting the air we breathe has been around since the invention of incense. In the last decade, innovative and inexpensive home scent delivery systems have exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry, and if there’s one common thread running throughout their design, it’s discretion. From the plug-in unit hidden behind the sofa to the tabletop dispenser camouflaged to blend with our knick-knacks, the scent systems in our homes strive to juggle high efficiency with low profile. The optimum system would provide 100% coverage with 0% visibility but, of course, that’s not possible, is it?

In a word, yes. Paint SCENTsations is an air freshener additive that literally makes a scent delivery system out of the paint on your walls. Just one ounce of Clean & Crisp or Vanilla Bean or, for those homes with particularly obstinate smokers or flatulent pets, Citrus Squeeze to a gallon of your favorite latex shade will produce a pleasant scent and eliminate odors for up to 12 months.

For realtors and property managers struggling to eliminate the odors left by former residents, says Simon Distributing President Pat Simon, the return on investment can be huge. “It takes between three and five gallons of paint to do the average apartment, so you’re talking about an additional $6 to $10, and you’re not adding any extra steps because you’re painting anyway.”

Endorphin Branding™ Hits the Big League!

The Whiff-Guys are thrilled that the Philadelphia Phillies will join the Tampa Bay Rays at St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field to decide this year’s World Series champion, and it has nothing to do with our affection for baseball. We’re excited because Tropicana Field, the first domed sports stadium in Florida, has also become the first Major League Baseball stadium to step into the age of endorphin branding™ with their own signature scent!

Designed by the Texas-based sensory branding firm DMX, the new Citrus Burst scent of the Trop began wafting through the air from the moment baseball fans first entered for last night’s Game 1 of the Series. Vice-president of branding and fan experience Darcy Raymond and the Rays’ manager of customer service and stadium experience Eric Weisberg, who worked with DMX on the creation of Citrus Burst, expect to roll out additional scents for the 2009 season.

Huge congratulations from the Whiff-Guys to Tropicana Field for pioneering a Multisensory Grand Slam!

Endorphin Branding™: School Spirit in a Bottle

“Endorphin branding™ is the use of scent as a means of imprinting a highly emotional, positive experience in tandem with a targeted signature scent, which can be reintroduced at a later time to trigger and recreate the desired response.” -C. Russell Brumfield

For sports fans, few moments are more emotionally charged than the final touchdown that takes the game or that tie-breaking home run in the bottom of the ninth. For savvy scent marketers, it’s an opportunity heaven-sent. If the fans were endorphin branded™ by release of their winning team’s signature scent at that pennant-waving, game-changing moment, not one of them present would ever forget that scent or the emotional impact of the moment in which they first encountered it. (Of course, fans of the losing team would be likely to have a reverse reaction to that scent, but controlled release of the appropriate team’s scent into appropriate areas of the stadium would keep negative branding to a minimum.)

When Katie Masich wanted to create a fragrance line that people could connect with–a line that sparked a personal passion and emotional connection, she thought about the existing fragrances on the market: celebrities, fashion houses, etc. She knew people connected with these fragrances, but she wanted to tap into a connection people experienced first-hand. And one day it hit her: What about the passion students, alumni, and fans feel for their college?

Katie had hit right on the concept of endorphin branding™! She and her family formed Masik Collegiate Fragrances, an innovative perfume company which relies on such distinctive characteristics as school colors, history, landmarks, and campus trees and flowers to formulate individual signature scents for universities. Masik recently launched official fragrances for both Pennsylvania State and the University of North Carolina, and has specialized fragrances for five more colleges in the works.

So, what does UNC smell like? Champagne, lemon, jasmine and lavender, according to Masich, with a hint of rose, violet and jasmine. “It’s very romantic and it has Southern charm,” says Masich, who is currently working to develop scents for the Universities of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana State. “It really is about nostalgia. It’s all about bringing it back to that happy time–college.”

Masik Collegiate Fragrances are fully licensed by the colleges for which they are created, with a portion of the proceeds from each bottle sold donated to that university’s scholarship and athletic fund.

Bringing Outer Space to Inner Space

Whiff!-readers know that certain scents have the effect of altering spatial perceptions. A whiff of apple can actually make that claustrophobic dorm room seem large enough to house two college students. But what if you really want to go all-out with this concept? Is there a mixture to make your cramped inner space smell more like infinite outer space?

Yes. According to the astronauts who have been there, outer space smells like fried steak, hot metal and motorbike welding fumes. And NASA, interested in preparing new astronauts for the conditions they will encounter in space, has commissioned chemist Steven Pearce to recreate the mixture. “I did some work for an art exhibition in July, which was based entirely on smell and one of the things I created was the smell of the inside of the Mir space station,” says Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients who began working for NASA in August. “NASA heard about it and contacted me to see if I could help them recreate the smell of space to help their astronauts.”

We do have a few clues as to what space smells like, according to Pearce. “First of all, there were interviews with astronauts that we were given, when they had been outside and then returned to the space station and were de-suiting and taking off their helmets, they all reported quite particular odors. For them, what comes across is a smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike, one of them said.”

Pearce hopes to have recreated the smell of space by the end of the year, although he admits that reproduction of hot metal is proving much more difficult to recreate in the laboratory than fried steak. “We think it’s a high energy vibration in the molecule and that’s what we’re trying to add to it now.”

You Can Stop Blaming the Dog

Remember when we told you about Benjamin Franklin’s interest in rendering “the natural discharges of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes”?

Franklin was kidding. A company called Garment Guard is not. The latest addition to their line of odor eliminating inserts is a “disposable gas neutralizer” called Subtle Butt. The activated carbon fabric pads measure 3.25″ x 3.25″ and adhere to the underwear with two adhesive strips. When the wind breaks, Subtle Butt absorbs and neutralizes the offensive gas.

No word yet from Garment Guard on eliminating the noise of flatulence, but it seems like a logical companion product. Where there’s Subtle Butt, can the Butt Muffler be far behind?

How Does Your Church Smell?

Inspired by the recent Newsweek piece on the Whiff-Guys’ suggestion that Endorphin Branding™ could help swing the election in this tight presidential race, Church Marketing Sucks, a site designed “to frustrate, educate, and motivate the church,” has opened a poll: Does branding your church with a specific scent take branding a step too far?

“Every now and then, a completely random smell will draw me in to some inexplicable happiness from my past,” writes Associate Editor Joshua Cody. “So here’s the question to ask yourself, ‘Does my church have a smell? Or does my church stink so bad that its smell wouldn’t trigger happy memories?’” While the poll is still underway, some interesting responses have already appeared. The complaint of one poster that his church currently smells like “old urine” prompted another to declare that his smells like “new urine.” “Scott” is not faring much better. The churches he has attended and worked at have “the rotten, wet, gray, business park carpet smell with a twinge of mildew” which he attributes to poorly manned carpet cleaning machines. Steve is praying for the olfactory salvation of them all, with “May the lessons in Smelly Church help your church become more smelly and less stinky,” while “Steve” asks simply, “Incense anyone?”

Poster “Kyle” demonstrates a deep understanding of the Endorphin Branding™ concept and its tremendous potential with this observation: “Smell is powerful. I will tell you Pilot (the truckstop gas stations) seem much more homey, oasis-like, cleaner AND more restful.. all because of the Subway franchises… Their gas stations smell like warm bread. It’s so great to wander into one at like 2 am after being on the road for a while. That scent creates a feeling of peace and safety- that’s one application I think is awesome. I’m not sure if churches should start baking their own communion bread or what but it could be awesome.. Mmm honey oat communion bread…..”

But it’s this insightful post over at Is It Working?, a learning site for students of ITT Tech, that seems to best hit the mark: “At first glance I thought this idea was kind of silly. I could see some churches spraying Fresh Baked Cookie Scent around to entice warm happy feelings. However, God—on more than one occasion—mentions the pleasing aroma of sacrifices. It seems to me that the idea that smell as a viable sensory input for worship is not one we should easily dismiss. There are many traditions in Church history that utilize scent in the worship service, and I’d imagine that the mere whiff of those incenses could put those that grew up with them into a more spiritually aware state.”

Narrative Perfumes: Every Sniff Tells a Story, Don’t It?

There’s an emerging trend in the world of personal fragrance, and this one has nothing to do with smelling pleasant or celebrity endorsement. Rather, Narrative Perfumes, as the moniker implies, attempt to tell a story through aromatic blends which smell like a specific time, place, or experience.

It’s all part of the “lightning hot” trend of scent marketing, says global fragrance expert Marian Bendeth, owner of the Toronto-based Sixth Scents. “They’re appealing to people who don’t want to smell like a teenager. If it’s exclusive, hard to find, if it’s different, they want it.”

Bond No. 9’s collection aims to recreate the experience of a stroll through the various neighborhoods of New York, from Wall Street (sea kale, cucumber, lavender, ambergris, vetiver) to Coney Island (margarita mix, melon guava, cinnamon, chocolate, caramel, vanilla, cedarwood). Soldat Inconnu (”Unknown Soldier”), a sort of post-traumatic stress trigger in a bottle, attempts to replicate the smell of the battlefield. By Killian’s scent Les Liaisons Dangereuses is redolent of “bodies slick with sweat, hot with odors of sexual favors,” while the Gothic perfumers at Black Phoenix Alchemy offer a line of literary character fragrances which includes such intriguing scents as a incense/jasmine/moss-blend to represent the Alice in Wonderland’s Caterpillar and Sleepy Hollow, described as “the butchest, manliest of musks covered in well-worn leather.”

Of course, any endorphin branded™ nostalgic trigger scent is all in the nose of the beholder and, as with broader applications of scent marketing, individual consumer response to each narrative perfume formula is bound to vary. Perfumers Etat Libre d’Orange’s controversial Magnifiques Secretions–which combines such conventional essenses as sandalwood and coconut with such decidedly unconventional ones as blood, sweat, saliva, and sperm–caused one Londoner to become so “traumatized” when it conjured up distant memories of a car accident that she “…couldn’t get it off me fast enough.”

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