The Curiosity Chronicles

Curious about…The Scent of Animals.

As I was driving yesterday I opened the car window and was immediately hit by a familiar, extremely strong and yet not totally unpleasant odor: fecund, slightly sour, like a cross between burning rubber and wet cut grass - after a few minutes I passed a dead skunk on the side of the highway, the source of the smell suddenly making sense. As someone who used to work in the perfume industry and has a strong passion for all things olfactive, I starred thinking about the smells of nature, how they have been harnessed for modern perfumery and how in many ways they act as a sensorial bridge between us and our mammalian cousins. First, worth looking at a few to understand their origins.

Ambergris is a solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull gray or blackish color produced in the digestive system of and regurgitated or secreted by sperm whales. Freshly produced ambergris has a marine, fecal odor. However, as it ages, it acquires a sweet, earthy scent commonly likened to the fragrance of rubbing alcohol without the vaporous chemical astringency.

Castoreum is excreted from the castor sacs of the mature North American Beaver. Within the zoological realm, castoreum is the yellowish secretion of the castor sac in combination with the beaver’s urine, used during scent marking of territory. Both male and female beavers possess a pair of castor sacs and a pair of anal glands located in two cavities under the skin between the pelvis and the base of the tail. Today, it is used in trapping, as a tincture in some perfumes, as a food additive, or touted as an aphrodisiac.

The African Civet is an omnivorous generalist, taking small vertebrates, invertebrates, eggs, carrion, and vegetable matter. Like all civets it has perineal glands that produce a fluid known as civetone, which it spreads on markers in its territory to claim its range. Used in the perfume industry, “civet” was originally the name for the scent obtained from this species: Middle French civette, from Old Italian zibetto, from Arabic zabAd, civet perfume.

Hyraceum is the petrified and rock-like excrement composed of both urine and feces excreted by the Cape Hyrax, commonly referred to as the Dassie. After aging and petrifying over hundreds (if not thousands) of years, it is a sought-after material that has been used in both traditional South African medicine and perfumery.

A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal wax cells built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae and stores of honey and pollen. It is used as an additive and fragrance for many products.

Deer musk is a substance with a persistent odor obtained from a gland of the male musk deer situated between its rectal area. The substance has been extensively used as a perfume fixative, incense material, and medicine, since ancient times. It was, and is still one of the most expensive animal products in the world. The name, originated from Sanskrit muṣká meaning “testicle”.

What Of It? Of course while many of these scents are now made chemically, for both conservational and cost reasons (after all, who really wants to collect whale shit…) their origins are fascinating. Tribal warriors and indigenous people still cover themselves with forest and animal scents to blend, mask themselves to unseen prey in hunting and to “become” part of the landscape. Even the modern redneck deer hunter covers himself with pungent deer urine so that he can get closer to his catch. The fact that these ingredients end up in fine fragrances and give them the necessary “edge” is yet another testament to scents ability to connect us to our limbic selves, allowing us to access our primal inner past lives. I love the fact that many of them are about marking territory - after all, if perfume is used to attract the opposite sex, make ourselves unseen (albeit in an invisible medium) and to signal ourselves to the world, what better way to do that than to burrow down into our evolutionary past and connect with our more deeply felt instincts?

I Am Curious about establishing connections to our limbic, “animal” selves, about senses and how they can do that, about scent, its mystery and power, about primal attraction, territory and our visceral sense of being.

Curious about…The Smell of Rain.

This morning I woke up here in Chicago and went outside: last night there were epic thunderstorm and today, broody clouds were scowling on the horizon. And then I smelt…that smell: the smell of rain, the scent of crackling electricity in the air, the sweet freshness tempered by the slightly acrid wet concrete - the smell…of Ozone.

Scientifically speaking…“The smell of rain is caused by ozone (O₃). It is commonly produced through dissociation of molecular oxygen (0₂) into two unstable atomic oxygens (2 O), each of which then recombine with molecular oxygen to make ozone. This dissociation can occur either by high-voltage electrical discharge or by bombardment with ultraviolet light. The high voltages which occur in thunderstorms create ozone within the cloud (even when lightning is not actively occuring), and this ozone is carried toward the ground by the downdraft in the thundercloud and blown out ahead of the storm, where you smell it and can tell rain is coming.”

In wooded areas, small bacterial spores called Actinomycetes are kicked up by thewater droplets and dispersed in the same way aerosol air fresheners work. These have a distinctive earthy smell. In addition, plants release all kinds of oils and congeners in response to their environment, including rain. Acid rain also plays a role as well. Acids commonly react with other chemical, and our built environment is full of chemicals, including gasoline and diesel, motor and food oils, paints and plastics, and lots more. These reactions release gases that can smell strongly.

 

For many, the most evocative ozonic is wet sidewalk concrete. Some rocks such as limestone also smell like this when wet. Science tells us it is the slow evaporation of calcium; small particles are released into the air which enter your nose, and there’s a gaseous calcium-containing molecule produced by interaction between carbon dioxide, water, and a calcium compound.

Fragrance company Demeter makes a single-note ozonic fragrance called “Thunderstorm.” Their website describes it (and the whole phenomena) beautifully: “Have you ever considered the olfactory side of rain? You know it’s coming, you can smell it in the air. It does seem that on summer days when it is hot and dry, with a thunderstorm brewing just over the next hill, you can `smell the rain.’ Well, you can smell something, but rain? Have you ever tried to smell this same rain in January when the ground is frozen solid? Not a chance, but when the ground and plants are warmer, you can smell something. What you really smell comes not from the air, but the ground! Plants release oils that enter the soil and blend with the other earthy odors. These odors are released into the air when the relative humidity at ground level exceeds 75 percent. Moist humid air will transmit odors far better than dry air. In these moist humid conditions we notice these odors more readily. And since rain is so often connected with moist humid air, we tend to associate one with the other. The Demeter Fragrance Thunderstorm captures this complex sensory moment perfectly. Like poetry, Thunderstorm is subtle and difficult to define, but real, with Thunderstorm reflecting the deep and violent nature of a summer storm.”

What Of It? There is something universal about this - I was in China a few months ago and noticed, after a particularly intense bout of rain, the familiar electric crackle-smell in the air; asking people about it, they all talked nostalgically about nature, happier times and the memories that it evoked. Fragrance manufacturers may try hard to recreate ozone, but there is something so indefatigable about it, hard to describe, deeply personal.

I Am Curious about nature and its ability to evoke profound sense memory, about universal experiences that each of us can deeply personalise, about nostalgic places, smells, and emotions. 

Curious about…Sillage.

pr: (see-large) n: a perfume’s trail. The art of evoking a presence, to create a scent memory.

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.” Helen Keller

I’ve been fascinated by smell my entire life.

Most of my earliest and deepest memories are to do with smells: the medicinal soothing twang of Calomine lotion being gently applied to my sunburned and sobbing back by my mother when I was four, the acrid stink of the Durians in the street markets in Singapore where I grew up, the thick mist on the kitchen windows that signified the overcooked brussel sprouts of the True English Christmas.

Recently I was in Chicago, staying at a fancy hotel on the Lake. I noticed everywhere I went that there was a nice, clean, kind of greeny-lemony-mossy smell; in the lobby, in the elevators, even on my towels. It smelt good, like a clean spring day should smell in your dreams. It was calming and reminded me of gathering brambles outdoors when I was a kid. I asked the manager what it was. It’s called “W-Essence” was the unfortunate answer. Clever - a viscerally-evoked nostalgia, to imprint more deeply the experience I was having. It stopped me in my tracks - could smell be the link in some way between the creation of mere “everyday” experiences and the deeper, more emotional, creation of memories?

Perfumery is a really extreme medium. On one hand, it is extreme science - molecular, chemical, technological, biological. On the other, it is poetry - extreme emotion. You’re designing an Obsession. The awareness of Eternity.A sense of Euphoria. 

Extreme science? Oudh is the rarest, most complex and therefore most expensive scent in the world. It is made from a rotting fungus that grows at shade-level on trees in Indonesia. It is said to smell “Like pure maths. Or deep space.” It is revered to be “like a star in eternal darkness.”

Extreme Chemistry? “Molecule One from new, underground brand Escentric Molecules, is no commercial blend. It’s not even a perfume really, more of a viral elixir. It’s just a clinical dose of a single-aroma chemical with a name as long as some distant galaxy’s. It comes in a menacing engineered bottle with strange light effects that shift in the dark. The aroma molecule is so complex, the body can only metabolize it very slowly so it appears to vanish, then reappear hours later, hovering like a stealth bomber over your skin.”  British Vogue

Extreme emotion? “Civet is a popular ingredient in a lot of perfumes. In concentration, civet reeks of the sewers of old Paris. In extreme dilution, maybe one part in a thousand, it’s the sweet tormented flesh of the sinner, and you want that in your fragrance.” John Galliano

Extreme art? Truffles are a missing link between fungi and animals. They contain labdanum, which is used in rare scent blends, particularly in heady Arabian perfumes. It is described as smelling hot and musky, “like the viscera of an odorous, hot furry little mammal in it’s last death throes. Crouching. Unknowable.”

What Of It? I’d love to understand better how to we design sillage. In other words, what can we learn and apply from the process of designing a fragrance that allows us to create not just experiences but lingering memories? 

I am Curious about the potency of harnessing the senses better, about the connection between scent, emotion and memory.