- Noses, and their ability to detect smell may not be as celebrated in words and songs as our other human senses, but today's guest says sense tells stories too.

She's Saskia Wilson-Brown, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, with the Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by Saskia Wilson-Brown, founder of the Institute for Art in Olfaction.

She joins us today from Los Angeles, California.

Welcome, Saskia.

- Thank you, nice to be here.

- So, the Institute for Art and Olfaction.

For those in our audience who maybe don't know what it is, tell us about it.

- Well, it's a non-profit devoted to experimentation and access in the field of perfumery, based in Los Angeles.

I founded it just about 10 years ago now, actually, so we're celebrating our 10th anniversary, and we do a lot of events relating to smell.

We help people incorporate smell into their own practices, artists, musicians.

And then we do a lot of education as well.

That's the short version.

- What was the inspiration for it?

- Well, I was working in television at the time, and I was interested in how TV was being, quote, democratized, or people were saying it was being democratized by YouTube, or I guess media was being democratized.

I became interested in the perfume industry, because the industry, as far as I could tell, hadn't gone through those processes of opening up yet.

So, I was inspired to examine that a little bit, and create a space for them, opening up so other people could learn about perfume, much like people have learned how to make media, with YouTube and DSLRs and so on.

- When you break it all down, smells and sense tell stories, and they have historically.

We're going to get into the history, which I found fascinating when I was talking to you before the show, but talk about the kinds of stories they tell, and why they tell stories.

- I think that something that appeals to story tellers about smell is that, when you're talking about, for instance, the traditional perfume structure, you're talking about a structure that has a three act structure.

There's a top, a middle and a base.

I think there's something very human about this idea of introduction, action, conclusion, that lends itself to story.

Also, smells themselves obviously convey information, much like words do or images do, and so you can use them to narrate something, for lack of a better example.

In that sense, I think smell really lends itself to story, and then story also lends itself to smell.

- These stories began a long time ago.

Give us the historical perspective on perfume and scent.

We could do a whole show- - There's such a deep history.

How long do we have?

- Take as much time as you want, because again, this is new to me, certainly, and fascinating.

- Yeah, well, to summarize, the history of smell is the history of humanity.

As long as we've been engaging in worship, seduction, beauty, commerce, all that stuff relates to smells.

The early instances archeologically of smell come to us from ancient Egypt, and then later, Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq.

And then there's instances in archeology of smell production, perfume production, actually, from Greece, all the way through the Romans, up to today.

And then, in ancient China, there's records of smell, in eighth century Japan, we have a record of incense practices.

There's all sorts of archeological and written evidence of people working with and using smell.

Typically, it falls in five areas of activity.

We talked about religious practices, being using incense or in churches or in worship in general.

Seduction.

There's a huge relationship between smell and seduction, through time.

Beauty and wellness.

Commerce.

And then also power.

Scent has been used to convey power from ancient times to today.

Yeah, it's a broad history, the history of humanity, really, which I find fascinating.

- Let's break some of those down.

Talk about the relationship between perfume and scent and power, and maybe you can give us some historical examples, names of rulers or kings or whatever.

- Sure, yeah.

This is a topic I'm studying a lot right now.

If you want to just summarize it, I think the relationship between scent and power would be that scent has been used to convey power.

Specific examples are Emperor Constantine in, what, 300 AD, more or less, in what's now Istanbul, would use scent.

They would disseminate aromatics along the routes he was walking, in order to convey this aromatic superiority, I guess, that was then equated with his manifestation of power.

Historically, people have always spoken about Cleopatra, in the context of smell and power, and largely, this comes to us from Roman perspectives, which tended to be a little bit sniffy, for lack of a better word.

There's this idea that Cleopatra would have used scent in order to, one, seduce the hapless Roman generals, but also to convey her power.

More recently, you have Louis XIV, who was so entranced with the idea of manifesting the glory and the power of France through his physical person, and that came out through his clothing, all the pomp and circumstance he set up at his newly-built palace in Versailles.

And then also smell.

He had a real interest in smell, almost, one might say, an obsession, so much so that, by the end of his life, a contemporary chronicler said that he became allergic to smell.

That tells you how much he was using smell, and from what I've researched, what I've concluded is that a lot of that was in the context of disseminating glory.

He didn't just look kingly; he smelled kingly.

And then, you also see the relationship in religion.

In most religions, God has a pleasant aroma, and God is all-powerful, and therefore these pleasant aromas are associated with that sense of power.

That's a summary of a big topic.

But I hope that explains it a little.

- Saskia, you talk about kings and royal courts where scent was very important.

When did scent, and I guess good scent, a sweet scent, desirable scent, become more democratic?

- I mean, it's interesting, because when you start to research this stuff, you see these movements towards democratizing scent through time, for instance, in the 19th century, there was a lot of people publishing about perfume.

But really, I would say, our current democratization, always in quotes, comes to us from the rise of the internet.

Like many things.

People started talking more about the ingredients, the materials of smell.

They started sharing more information about how smells are made.

And then, in the '70s, there was a new technology, the GCMS.

I can never say it right.

Gaschromato-Mass Spectrometry, which can tell you what are the molecular components of a smell.

What that allows people to do is effectively reverse engineer what's in a perfume.

That of course led to a lot of information sharing.

And then, middle men came that would sell the materials at smaller amounts, and we're talking contemporary materials, we're talking about both naturals and synthetics.

In the last 20 or so years, you saw a big difference in how scent was being shared.

- [G. Wayne] Can you walk us through the process today of creating and coming up with a scent or a new perfume?

Creating it, manufacturing it, marketing it.

It obviously is much different than 100 years ago, or even 20 years ago.

What is that process like?

- [Saskia] Yeah.

The change really happened in the 1800s, with the rise of the synthetics.

The first synthetic material was isolated from tonka bean, and was called coumarin, and it was named coumarin by a French chemist and a German chemist that discovered it simultaneously.

Long story short, what that allowed to happen is scent was being made at larger quantities, and eventually the synthetics themselves became more important, and the companies started subsuming one another.

And so, the whole 20th century is a march towards where we are today.

And so, to answer your question, the way a scent gets made in the mainstream is there's fragrance houses.

AFF, Givaudan, Firmenich, Takasago, Mane.

They have different names.

They are working with companies like L'Oreal or LVMH to create smells for new launches.

Mainstream perfumery is entirely corporate.

Let's use an example, like fashion company A decides they're going to launch a perfume in 2023, and it's going to be a perfume about power.

They write a creative brief.

They run it through whoever owns the company, or the company itself that control it.

Let's say they run it through the execs at L'Oreal, LVMH or Coty or something.

And then they go to the fragrance houses with whom they have a relationship.

They say, "This is what we want to do.

What have you got?"

There's a back and forth process.

At some point, it gets approved and it goes into production.

It's a very far cry from how perfume would have been made 200 years ago, when it was mostly individual perfumers with workshops in Paris, for instance, or even 2000 years ago in ancient Greece, when it was, again, small companies and workshops, using what was available.

- Are these research scientists that are toiling away in a laboratory?

I think the example you used was power.

Someone go back, say, "Well, what does power smell like?"

How do you tie those emotions to scents?

- This is where the art of perfumery kicks in, I think.

There's some common agreement.

For instance, we might all agree that, for whatever reason, maybe we think that vanilla doesn't smell powerful, because we associate it with, let's say, young women.

I'm just using examples.

I think that there's some sort of cultural knowledge that we share, generally speaking, although that does change a lot between countries and regions.

The perfumers, who are really the core artists of this whole affair, have to have that task of saying, "Well, how do I interpret power?

How does the client interpret power?

How do I lend that to smell?"

It's really hard.

It's really subjective, I think.

It's really a process of agreement, like any client would.

You go back and forth.

- You said something there that I found really fascinating, that there's some cultural cues here.

I've heard comedians describe that there are jokes that might work in one country won't work in another, because you lack that cultural reference point.

The same is true with scent?

- For sure, yeah.

For sure.

An example I like to give is, in the US, when we smell clove, you know the smell of cloves?

- [Jim] Yeah.

- We're generally more prone to think about that in the context of some sort of family celebration, like Thanksgiving or something like that, or Christmas.

It's got that at home, cozy, family association, generally speaking.

Whereas, if you were raised, for instance, in France, where it was more common to use clove products in dental work, the clove smell might associate one with the dentist, so it's an entirely different set of associations.

That is true.

I think a lot of materials have different associations culturally.

Yeah.

- Is there a finite number of scents, or is there an infinite number of scents?

Perfume now has centuries and centuries and centuries of history.

But new ones are still emerging.

Do we reach a point where that's it?

We've come up with every scent possible?

- [Jim] You've got them all behind you now.

- Yeah.

- I mean, that's the question for any artist, I think.

Have we reached the apex of painting?

The thing that's different about perfumery is that there's new aromatic molecules being developed all the time.

Every couple years, or every year or so, the fragrance houses put out, I'm not going to quote a number, but let's say around six or five new molecules that they developed in house.

They're literally inventing new smells.

For that reason, I think it's sort of limitless, but you do hit a peak flower perfume.

How many more flower perfumes do we need?

But it's all about human ingenuity.

The limits of perfumery or working with smell is the limits of human ingenuity, and capacity to get comfortable with strange combinations.

- Can you give us a sense, dollar-wise, of the size of the perfume industry, both in the US and globally?

- [Saskia] Top of mind, I don't have more recent numbers, but I researched some numbers from the most recent ones I could find, in 2016, for context.

The big six, the fragrance houses IFF, Firmenich, Takasago, Mane, Givaudan, and Symrise.

These are big six corporations that basically make the fragrances, their combined value or output or income, I suppose, was $15.93 billion.

- [G. Wayne] Wow.

- [Jim] Wow.

- And that's just one component of the industry, and that was 2016.

It's a big industry.

- [Jim] Intellectual property has to be a piece of this, if there's that much money at play.

I'm assuming you can't patent a smell, but you can patent a compound.

Is that reasonable?

- It's complicated.

You can't copyright a smell formula.

If I write a recipe, as it were, and it goes to market, and it's a mega-hit, I can't protect that from being copied, and that's why you see all these copycat perfumes.

What were they called?

I can't remember what they were called.

But you know the perfumes that, "If you loved Chanel No.

Five, you'll love Channel No.

10."

It's almost precisely the same.

What you can protect in perfumery is you can patent a process by which you come to a new smell.

That process of developing the chemistry, it can be protected.

These patented aromatic molecules are known as captive molecules, and they're captive by the fragrance house that developed them.

That patent runs out.

Sorry?

- [Jim] I just want to be clear.

A pharmaceutical company develops a new compound.

They can patent and own the copyright of that compound for I think it's 18 years.

A fragrance company can't do the same thing with a new formulation?

- Not the formulation, but the process by which they come to the compound.

The aromatic that they use in the formulation is what they can protect.

It's not 18 years in perfumery.

I think it's seven or eight.

I'm not a legal scholar, so definitely check those facts.

But it's around there.

The point is that, because there's not very clear copyright protection on the actual formulations, the recipe, as it were, it's a very easy thing to copy.

There's a lot of copycat perfumes.

- Talk to us about the consumer side of this business.

What are the factors that go into a person deciding to get a specific perfume?

Obviously, advertising is a big piece of it, but then you have to at some point smell it.

You go into a Macy's or you go into a CVS, or some other retail outlet, and most of those places, you're allowed to at least smell.

What goes into that whole decision-making process?

What drives a person to buy- - [Saskia] If I had the answer, I'd be a multimillionaire.

I think there's a lot of factors at play.

Of course, there's very sophisticated marketing strategies, based on consumer research and all that.

But to me, I think the core of why people pick certain smells or perfumes, if you want to talk about perfume, is a question of how they want to perceive themselves.

I want to be perceived as, as an example, a powerful man who's going to go make a million bucks today.

I'm going to pick a certain set of parameters in my decision than others.

It generally has very little to do with the smell itself, unfortunately.

The perfume is the afterthought, often, in these decisions, unless you really don't like it.

But the marketing, the packaging, the imagery, that's what brings people there.

I think that's actually the power of perfume, is it's all about perception and communication, and what you want to communicate in this very intangible way, which can be quite meaningful for people.

- [G. Wayne] Do you find that consumers purchase, find and like a particular perfume and stay with that over time?

I'll give you an analogy.

If you drive Toyotas, you may always want to buy a Toyota.

Do people switch around, or do they cling to a particular perfume for a long period of time?

Do you have any sense of that?

- I do.

I think people get very attached to things in general.

It's like a human thing.

Also, perfume's related to memory, so you start to associate your own lived experience with a certain smell, or your mother, or your first partner, whatever.

But there's this idea in mainstream perfumery, which I should say is really not my area of expertise.

I just know from what I've learnt just doing my own work, but that there's the fragrance wardrobe, and this idea that you can select a fragrance to reflect whatever activity you're having that day.

A night on the town with your best friend is different from a black tie gala, or a day at work is different from hanging at the beach.

The smells can reflect those different situations.

But most people that I come across have an identifying smell that they're very attached to.

That's something that I don't know how to explain, except that it has to do with their own self perception.

- Let's come back for a second to the Institute for Art and Olfaction.

You have a wide array of programs that you actually operate.

But one of the things that fascinated me was helping artists incorporate scent into their work.

Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

- Yeah.

My back background is I was an artist.

One of the reasons I became interested in scent, in addition to the questions of access and power, was the potential for communication in the context of art.

A lot of what we do is artists come to us, and they say, "Hey, I have an exhibition at this and that museum, and I want to convey the smell of Capri in the fall," whatever it is.

And so, we'll help them figure out how to do that.

One, what that actually smells like, what molecules, what aromatics to pick.

And then also, there's a lot of technicalities about how you convey smell in public spaces in particular, because people have discomforts or they have sensitivities.

We give a lot of advice and help on that, in that regard.

We've had crazy projects.

I don't mean that pejoratively.

For instance, we had artists coming to us, asking us for the smell of fear, children screaming in fear, which- - [Jim] What does that smell like?

- Your guess is as good as mine, as to how to do that.

It's a tricky one.

- Another mission of the institute is experimentation.

Break that down for us.

What kinds of experiments?

I'm looking at all these things in the background here, and thinking those are probably some of the ingredients of many experiments.

- Yeah, well, it can be anything from an olfactory experimentation, like, "Let's try this new combination that isn't very popular or mainstream or sellable."

But mostly, the experimentation we engage in has to do with the broader culture of perfumery as a whole.

An example is we worked with a gallery here in Los Angeles to create a series of motion sensitive scent robots that disseminated smell, based on motion.

That's a sort of experimentation.

It's in the applications of smell: where you can use it, how you can disseminate it.

Those of course were meant to be public art, so we were going to install them in the streets of LA, and people would get this smell as they walked by.

But eventually, we realized that part wasn't so popular an idea.

(hosts laughing) - One of the- - [Saskia] Things like that.

- One of the classes that you offer is called Meet A Nose.

What is Meet A Nose?

- Nose, or nez in French, is a traditional term that people have used to talk about perfumers, and it's a term that is associated with the Eurocentric perspective of perfumery, that perfumery comes to us from France, which is fallacious, it's not true, for obvious reasons.

There's a history of perfumery throughout humanity.

The Meet A Nose program is first, for subverting that a little bit, by pointing out that everybody has a nose and everybody's, to a certain degree, able to engage with smell.

So, what we do is we interview artists and perfumers and thinkers in the field of olfaction, and we ask them about their practice.

It's just a very simple interview show, where I do the interview instead of being interviewed.

- [G. Wayne] You also sponsor exhibits at the institute.

What are those about?

Maybe you can tell us what the next one is, or the current one is.

- Sure, yeah.

We have a small gallery at the institute.

It's not huge, but it's big enough.

We host exhibitions of art that uses olfaction, or the senses in general, but specifically smell.

Recently, we had a show from an artist called Sarana Mehra, who's a British Indian artist, who is now living in Los Angeles, relating to how she experienced the pandemic, and the fear of smelling and fear of being close enough to smell somebody, because if you're close enough to smell someone, you're probably able to get their COVID if they- - [Jim] Not social distancing.

- There's a real anxiety about that.

She explored that in the show.

And then we have one coming up, opening on Friday, by an artist called Joe Merrell, who also, everyone's processing the pandemic, is doing a show that relates to how he processed his own experience of grief and loss during the pandemic.

Also through smell.

Smell relates a lot to our perceptions of our partners and our loved ones, so that's what he's exploring in that, a little bit, the loss of a loved one.

- You also have a podcast: Perfume On The Radio.

One of the challenges that we've had here today was lack of smell-o-vision.

How do you talk about scent?

It's like describing the color blue.

What kind of- - What chicken tastes like.

- Exactly.

How do you- - Impossible.

- In the 30 seconds that we have left, how do you get guests to talk about scent in an engaging manner?

- There's a lot of poetic speaking.

"This feels like this one time I was in the wind."

But also, we talk a lot about culture, the cultures around smell.

The smell itself becomes the conduit to a larger conversation around bigger topics, like loss and death, cats.

You name it.

- Well, Saskia, this has been just a fascinating conversation.

Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

She's Saskia Wilson-Brown, the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles, California.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us at Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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