Scents and sensibilities

Vintage modified ad (reproduced under fair use exemptions for satire)

Recently, at the local pool where I swim a couple of times a week, I’ve noticed a very strong perfume smell when I get into the pool. Presumably, my swimming schedule has begun to coincide with someone who douses themselves liberally with a scent that to my nose smells like an unholy mixture of talcum powder and disinfectant.¹ That I can smell it over the chlorine is a testament to how powerful it is, because the pool is so heavily chlorinated that showering after a swim doesn’t completely remove it. In fact, the perfume is so intense that I can actually smell it under water—it almost feels like I’m tasting it when I swim.

This sensation is one that most of us have experienced from time to time. You’re out and about—on transit, at the supermarket, or passing through the duty-free section at the airport—and you’re briefly assailed by an intensely strong fragrance. While most of us don’t find this particularly pleasant, whether it’s worse than strong BO or a particularly pungent silent-but-deadly fart is debatable.

Naturally, the good folk at Reddit have discussed this topic at some length,² with one Redditer positing on an ‘unpopular opinions’ thread that ‘Excessive perfume, cologne, etc. is worse than body odor’. This opinion did indeed prove unpopular, with respondents almost universally disagreeing with the poster. ‘You’re alone on this one’ seemed to be the general view, with most people arguing that really bad BO was infinitely worse than strong perfume, even for those who reacted badly to the latter.

To quote one commenter, ‘Some fragrances give me migraines, so I totally get where you’re coming from... But honestly if we’re forced to pick, I’m still going to take that over extreme body odor. I’ve smelled people that genuinely made me nauseous from across a room’. The general view was that anyone who felt that excessive perfume was worse than BO clearly hadn’t been exposed to truly heinous body odour, although Sex Panther, the cologne that self-declared ladies’ man Brian Fantana uses in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, suggests there may be exceptions.

Throughout recorded history, humans have used perfumes, along with techniques such as fumigation, to both cover and enhance the natural odours of the body. The term perfume itself comes from the Latin words per (‘through’) + fumare (‘to smoke’). Although our sense of smell is less developed than that of other primates, in The Scented Ape, the zoologist Michael Stoddart argues that scent plays an important, albeit under-recognised, role in human interaction.

Biological anthropologists have suggested that far from being a superficial adornment, fragrance use in humans is based on biologically evolved chemical signalling as well as cultural beliefs and practices. Notably, the manipulation of natural body odours seems to be universal. While this is frequently accomplished via the use of perfumes and scented oils, it’s also achieved through the application of substances like clay and smoke. For example, according to the anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya, hunter gatherers living on the Andaman Islands use smoke and clay paints to either release or confine their smell, which is considered critical in regulating their interactions with the spirit and animal world.

Anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss and Annick Le Guérer have argued that all cultures distinguish between foul- and pleasant-smelling odours. However, there’s a considerable degree of cross-cultural variability in terms of what smells are singled out as pleasant and unpleasant, perhaps most notably in the realm of body odour itself.

This is particularly evident in American attitudes towards body odour, which the anthropologist Marybeth Macphee suggests diverged from European practices of personal hygiene in the twentieth century. Helped in no small measure by the marketing efforts of the hygiene industry, Americans developed the conviction that natural body odours were offensive. Thus, while the desire to enhance one’s scent might be universal, Macphee suggests that the drive to annihilate one’s natural odour in the process seems to be distinctively American.

Chandler Burr, the author of The Perfect Scent, is said to have observed that Americans wear fragrance to signal that ‘I’m clean; don’t run away!’, whereas Europeans wear fragrance to say ‘I’m sexy; come get me’.³ The classic—albeit questionable—illustration of this cultural difference in attitudes towards natural body odour is the missive that Napoleon allegedly penned to Josephine before his return home from a military campaign: ‘Home in three days. Don’t bathe’.

Beyond cultural differences in attitudes towards natural body odour, there are also differences in the kinds of perfumes people are attracted to, and the intensity of scent considered desirable. Class differences are also evident, at least based on UK stereotypes about ‘chavs’ plastering themselves in cloying scents. While etiquette dictates that it’s rude to comment negatively on another person’s bodily odour (well, at least to their face⁴), norms around this have changed somewhat in the face of rising concerns about fragrance sensitivities.

Fragrance sensitivities is a broad term covering skin rashes caused by physical contact with fragrances, along with reactions from inhaling them. Coughing, sneezing, shortness of breath, irritated nasal passages, asthma attacks, migraines, dizziness and anxiety have all been reported, although the severity of these responses varies from person to person. For most people, the symptoms are minor, transitory and brought on by select fragranced products. For a minority, they are serious, debilitating and activated by a wide array of products: perfume, deodorisers, hand cream, shampoo, laundry detergent, fabric softener, you name it.

Estimates vary on how common debilitating fragrance sensitivities are. One study investigating the effects of fragranced consumer products on the general population in the USA, Australia, UK and Sweden found that 32.2% had some form of fragrance sensitivity, with disabling impacts confined to 9.5% of those surveyed. A German study found a 19.9% prevalence rate for fragrance sensitivity, with stronger reactions evident in 5%. Conversely, a Saudi Arabian study reports a prevalence of 14.6%, with disabling impacts confined to 2.6%.

One of the reasons for these varying statistics is the subjective nature of fragrance sensitivity—there are no reliable diagnostic tests for inhalation-based sensitivities. This is, in part, because the reaction is usually to an irritant that has reached a certain concentration as opposed to an allergy per se, but also because there is often a psychosomatic as well as physiological component to chemical sensitivities.

Smells have a unique capacity to evoke a strong physical response, especially feelings of disgust and revulsion. To quote Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, ‘Unlike other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation’. As the neuroscientist Amanda Ellison discusses, we don’t just perceive smell based on the odour chemicals it contains but together with all our memories of that smell. These associations can be so powerful that certain smells produce an immediate physical reaction.

Scent-free policies have become an increasingly common response to the issue of fragrance sensitivities, especially in North America. Today they can be found not just in hospitals, but in a growing number of workplaces as well. Anthropologically speaking, I find such policies fascinating because while they are presented as a neutral mechanism for creating healthier workplaces, they implicitly target bodies and the scents they emanate, making them far more fraught than the smoke-free policies on which they are clearly modelled.

I speak here from personal experience, having unwittingly violated a scent-free policy about 15 years ago when I was living in Vancouver. I was at a local hospital to deliver a workshop on research ethics when a woman sat down directly in front of me, started unpacking her things, and then suddenly demanded to know whether I was wearing perfume. Surprised by the question—and her evident hostility—I hesitantly confessed that I was.⁵

The woman proceeded to aggressively berate me for violating the hospital’s scent-free policy, but there was little I could do, aside from cancelling the workshop, which was the very reason why she and everyone else was there. I tried to apologetically explain that I had no idea of the policy as I didn’t work at the hospital, but she wasn’t interested in my excuses. ‘What good is that to me, when I’m going to have a migraine for the rest of the day’, she responded. Spotting an evaluation form for the session on the table next to me, she grabbed one and sat back down, scrawling furiously on the form, before folding it, reaching over to pop it in the cardboard collection box, and then storming out the room.

The incident demonstrates one clear limit of scent-free policies, which is that they can’t be readily enforced in workplaces open to the public—as litigation has shown. But even in closed environments, they are still difficult to police. Ask a Manager provides an interesting illustration of this problem. In the case under discussion, a revised scent-free policy had recently been introduced in the local chapter of a hobby group. Historically, when members joined, they were advised that it was a scent-free group due to one member’s extreme fragrance sensitivity, and members were expected to ‘make an effort to be scent-free’.

Despite members’ efforts to reduce their use of fragrances, the woman continued to experience issues, thus leading to the revised policy. Members were given a lengthy list of ways to reduce their scent, including changing laundry powder, shampoos, soaps and a variety of other household products. To ensure their compliance, they were also advised that ‘at the next meeting, each member would be greeted with a big friendly hug so we could be smelled’. If traces of scent were found, they were told that they would be asked to wash themselves in the bathroom.

Unsurprisingly, most group members took strong exception to the revised policy, noting the offensiveness of an approach that involved both hugging and sniffing people, the difficulties of determining and controlling what scents might be offensive, and the ineffectiveness of the solution presented. Clearly, washing in a bathroom wasn’t going to resolve the issue if the scent was from laundering clothes or washing one’s hair. In such instances, would women then be expected to leave the premises? ‘What is the balance between the rights of one and the rights of the group?’ the letter writer asked.

The case reminded me of an incident that happened to a friend in the mid-1990s when we were undergraduates at university in Australia. She was sitting in a tutorial when a woman suddenly demanded to know if anyone was wearing Estee Lauder’s Sunflowers perfume, declaring that she was allergic. The woman clearly expected the culprit to identify themselves and leave the tutorial. Everyone in the tutorial denied wearing the perfume and the woman, visibly annoyed, ended up leaving herself. Afterwards, my friend confessed that she, in fact, was the culprit, but she didn’t see why she should have to leave the tutorial when it wasn’t her fault that the woman happened to be allergic to her perfume.

More recently, my sister and mum had a similar experience while in line at a cafe in the USA. Out of the blue, they were accosted by a woman demanding to know if either of them was wearing perfume. Taken aback by the woman’s aggression, my sister, who actually was wearing perfume, indicated that she wasn’t. My mother, who was genuinely perfume-free, responded likewise. Although clearly disbelieving them, the woman, who had presumably expected them to leave the cafe in deference to her fragrance sensitivity, gave them a dirty look and left herself.

These two incidents raise questions around when chemical sensitivity becomes what’s been called ‘chemical entitlement’, but they also speak to differences in how we respond to irritants depending on their source. For example, I’m reasonably allergic to pollen and severely allergic to cats; the first results in hay fever, the latter in asthma attacks. But there’s no ready culprit to blame for either of these allergies.

As Maeve Harrigan in the TV show Mobland recently noted of Mother Nature, she’s ‘a heartless, pitiless, unsympathetic, brutal, barbaric bitch who knows no mercy or pardon… but everybody loves her—worships her’, an observation, coincidentally, that also sums up my personal view of cats.⁶ However, if I’m on the tube and someone is using their phone without headphones, I frequently feel the urge to yell at them to turn it off.

The difference is in my perception that I can control the irritant—or, rather, that the culprit could, if they weren’t being an asshole. In effect, it’s the sense of intrusion into my personal space that provokes this response. Experts like the neurologist Alan Hirsch and the psychologist Pamela Dalton suggest this is also central to the experience of fragrance sensitivity itself. However, the reaction is clearly heightened by the fact that the irritant is not merely annoying but physically distressing. That people with such sensitivities occasionally accost perfumed strangers going about their business is therefore probably to be expected.

But given the sheer ubiquity of scented products in our daily lives, which are virtually possible to avoid, in combination with the fact that it seems to be in the nature of humans to manipulate our bodily odour, I wonder about the value of pitting individuals against each other on the basis of their scent. After all, an entirely different response to the issue of fragrance sensitivity would be to regulate the sort of chemicals that can be used in cosmetic and hygiene products (an area where safety standards are notoriously poor) to ensure that those chemicals known to produce strong adverse responses are avoided.

In the end, it’s clear is that there are no straightforwardly pleasant and unpleasant smells. Instead, as with most things, it’s the dose that makes the poison. If that potentially means we could all ease up a little on the perfume, I’d certainly be happy to no longer swim in the scent of disinfectant-laced talcum powder. But we can’t get around the fact that scents are not merely accessories that can be discarded like a scarf. This means that for most of us, being criticised on the basis of your scent is exactly the same as being criticised on the basis of your smell—and it’s a rare person indeed who responds well to effectively being told ‘You stink!’

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1. This begs the question of whether the bearer of the scent is a new mother, although I’m confident it’s an actual perfume. This proves that the nose wants what the nose wants, because for every perfume ten people hate, another ten adore it. My vote for worst perfume goes to Tabu—‘the scent that puts a spell* everywhere it touches’. Big in Australia in the 1980s, it has been described as ‘a cross of sandlewood, rotten eggs, with a hint of dirt’.

*This marketing claim is entirely accurate, if that spell is a curse.

2. Reddit has not failed me yet. Whatever question occurs to me when I work on these posts, no matter how random, bizarre or obscure, I’m always amazed to find that there is at least one Reddit thread devoted to the topic.

3. As far as I can tell, this is Axe’s entire marketing schtick, although it’s one that often goes in some dark and surreal directions. For the record, Axe was originally a French brand but is now based in the UK, where it goes by the brandname Lynx.

4. It’s happened to me twice, and both encounters were deeply unpleasant. The first, which I have detailed in ‘Pits of Despair’ in my book Silent but Deadly, took place on a bus when a drunk old lady told me I smelled like I hadn’t taken a shower for a week. The second, detailed later in this post, was a run-in with a woman with a fragrance sensitivity. Although the circumstances were very different, in both instances my reaction was a mixture of embarrassment, humiliation and, if I’m being honest, indignation, despite being technically at fault in the latter instance.

5. For the record, I was not doused in the stuff, my strategy for applying it being inspired by Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News.

6. ‘Don’t touch that cat’, my husband always tells me; ‘You’ll regret it’. But I always do.