Approach to designing smells
In literature, Marcel Proust’s madeleines immortalized the world of scents and their power to evoke memories. Scent and its extreme ambivalence reached an even broader public with Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume and the subsequent film version. In fact, we really cannot escape smells (unless our olfactory organ is damaged or our noses are blocked) everything has a smell, everywhere, always, whether good or bad. The sense of smell is located somewhere between the distant senses of sight and hearing and the near senses of touch and taste; subjectively, it is often polarized as scent or stench.
The sense of smell is closely associated with breathing and connects us to the world; it also has an evolutionary, biological protective function and is directly related to emotions and particularly to sexuality. The sense of smell also involves innate responses, which makes it a fascinating, and a debatable, attribute to influence. We do not pay much attention to a particular odor (whether a pleasant scent or an unpleasant stench) if it does not stand out among the usual mix of smells.
This can be problematic since it can still have a significant, though unconscious, influence on our physical and, even more, on our psychological and social states. In other words, smell can be easily used as a subtle means of manipulation. In recent years, methods of creating artificial fragrances and flavors have become more sophisticated and as more food in the future will be either genetically manipulated or flavoraltered, -enhanced, -intensified, or -neutralized (Food Design), olfactory design is also on the rise. Regardless of our cultural differences, society, and its increasing desire to sublimate human instinctive drives, is gradually rejecting natural human and other smells.
Sweat, in a controlled everyday public environment, is condemned as being an almost animal stench by a society obsessed with hygiene and removing all evidence of human perspiration. Nonetheless even pleasant smells have cultural and social connotations that result from individual psychological patterns and the personal memories they can trigger. Hence, studios and businesses are beginning to dedicate themselves to the design aspects of scent and smell as they do to sound design.
Their approach to designing smells is usually directed at creating what are considered good and pleasant fragrances, or neutralizing unpleasant smells or stenches. Chemists, biologists, and designers busy themselves with deactivating odors considered repulsive (for example, in toilets).
But it begins to be even more interesting when scent inhibitors can be used for birth control. Recent research has established that sperm uses scent receptors to track egg cells, meaning, metaphorically, that if the sperms’ noses are blocked, they will be unable to find the egg cells. Scent design that is aimed at concealing the human smell, or standardizing it artificially by making it smell good, that is socially acceptable, is even more enlightening. This includes all cosmetic products, especially perfumes or colognes.
The famous noses of the perfume business are a highly sophisticated coterie of scent designers. Although perfume is nothing more than a mixture of essential oils or extracts almost all of which are now synthetic dissolved in alcohol, there are over two thousand standard substances available to the perfumer.
A typical perfume recipe consists of approximately forty, though sometimes as many as a hundred, different essential oils. But there are areas other than perfume-making where olfactory design is not as obvious and cannot be consciously detected. They range from the real leather fragrance applied to imitation leather in affordable cars to the appetite-stimulating smell of freshly baked bread emanating artificially from the bakery, gas stations that smell of freshly brewed coffee instead of gasoline, travel-agent offices that smell like beaches and the ocean, and finally to the “air care” or “indoor air quality” concepts in department stores, boutiques, and office buildings.
These subtly and barely perceptible scents are emitted in shops or offices by airconditioning systems in order to stimulate, relax, increase attention, or raise the trust of shoppers and office workers, making olfactory design an important part of advanced strategies in branding and establishing corporate identity.