You Need to Be Smell-Maxxing

In praise of the 5th sense

Imagine you’re at an antique shop. You see something that resembles a genie lamp and decide to give it a rub. Alas, it’s not your lucky day. Instead of a friendly wish-granter, out pops a devilish fiend. The spirit grabs hold of you and demands you must give up one of your senses to be let go. You’ve got to cut down from 5 and live with only 4 for the rest of your days.

Which one are you giving up? Almost universally, I think the answer would be Smell.

If we could somehow sell our senses on the open market, the clearing prices (in USD) would probably be something like

Sight/Sound: Millions to Indispensable. The tier of “can not live without”

Touch/Taste: Hundreds of thousands minimum, higher depending on circumstances and how hedonic a person is.

Smell: Closer to 0, some may even give it away for free.

More than any other sense, smell often encounters unpleasantness. It’s pretty easy to avoid eating gross food once you figure out what things you enjoy. Tougher to do with scents. You call an Uber and you pray the car doesn’t reek of B.O.

It’s the only sense where having a super-heightened version is considered a medical condition rather than a superpower. Men with outstanding vision become pro baseball players, A superlative taster might become a great chef. Guys with strong noses get nauseated walking down the street.

The Most Humane Sense?

It may be the most hated sense, but smell also might be the one most directly linked with vitality.

It has a certain primacy that can’t really be matched by the other ways of feeling. You can see a picture and recognize it’s beautiful and intellectually describe some reason why. Smell hits different. You catch a whiff of something and simply return to monke.

“smell good” “I like them, they smell nice” “smell bad, i must avoid”

It’s hard to really explain why exactly a scent may be favorable. Perfumes and colognes are often full of ingredients that add a touch of musk or “stinkiness” that for some reason causes arousal. It’s all about creating aromas that fire off primal triggers. Whether good or bad, smell embodies an innate animal perception that guides you. The phrase “I smell trouble” is very appropriate. It’s signifying that feeling of knowledge that seems to operate beyond the brain.

If you meet someone that smells bad you kind of immediately want to get away from them. Could be the nicest person in the world: friendly, beautiful, charismatic etc. If the smell is off it’s going to leave a negative impression, there’s no way around it. Indian people could probably make great strides in improving their perception abroad if they just made sure to get their body odor in line with Western sensibilities.

Less Commercialized

The internet has brought us a constant stream of audio-visual content to the point where our receptors in these domains are likely getting fried from overuse. A few minutes scrolling and you’ll be exposed to more sights and sounds than ancient man would ever experience in his entire lifetime.

Smell however, remains pretty unadulterated by the digital age. They haven’t yet put a port in your smartphone which can transport scents (maybe we’ll get there on iPhone 29).

To smell something you have to actually experience it, you can’t get the cheap digital facsimile. In some ways, the nose connects you to the world on a deeper level. When you walkabout a city you get the shit and the roses, it’s the range of raw human experience.

Sure, there’s plenty of cosmetic companies trying to sell people scented products, but it’s small compared to the onslaught of say the food-industrial complex. You’ve got food critics, celebrity chefs, multinational snack conglomerates, recipe influencers, dietary cult leaders and so on. The idea of a “smellfluencer” is so unusual that Jeremy Fragrance has become rather famous as a singular person in the niche.

Supreme Memory Jogger

Everyone knows the deepness of motor-memory (“It’s like riding a bike, you never forget”). A musician goes years without touching the piano, sits down and gets right back into form. Many such cases.

Much has also been written about the connection of taste with remembrance. Proust immortalized the “Madeleine Cake Moment” when you eat something from your childhood and are instantly transported back in time. In my opinion, smell rivals these forms of memory.

I don’t know what The Science™ says about the matter, but you will hear many stories of fragrances being forever attached to the memory of an ex-lover. Woman walks into department store and starts breaking down in tears after catching a whiff of a certain cologne. The idea of a “signature scent” is very real and very powerful.

I myself have experienced similar reactions with odors. Walking through a park thousands of miles from where I grew up, and suddenly I’m hit with a smell of late-spring grassy, pollenated, earthiness. The kind of scent that doesn’t necessarily smell good, but is pungent and tickles the nose. Immediately, I was mentally transported back to grassy fields I would play in as a youth. It was like stepping into a time machine for a brief moment.

I’m sure many of you reading this have felt something like this. It’s a pure and delightful feeling. Only possible through the nose.