Authors: Molly Birnbaum
Whether this inability stemmed from an injury or distortion or simply disuse, I could train myself to recover, I thought. I could train myself the way Grosinger had. The way Achatz, Laudamiel, and Fauvel had.
After all, I knew the possibilities. Olfaction is an especially plastic sense. The perception of smell in particular—from the ability to discriminate between odors, to label, to the simple likes and dislikes of specific scents—is subject to emotion and memory. It is subject to suggestibility and language. But even more so, it is subject to exposure. It is subject to learning.
Hence: Grasse.
The sense of smell is a largely learned ability, Jay Gottfried, an associate professor of neurology who specializes in olfaction at Northwestern University, told me. The typical human can detect tens of thousands of smells. But how does one discriminate and remember each one? Training, he said.
Gottfried and colleagues conducted a study at his lab at Northwestern that showed that after a test subject smelled the essence of mint for three and a half minutes, he or she had a largely increased ability to discern different odors in the same group—such as spearmint and peppermint—for up to twenty-four hours following. Gottfried qualified this heightened awareness as “expertise,” and, he says, it only grew over time.
Even for those who cannot smell, training can help. Thomas Hummel, a scientist and physician at the Smell and Taste Clinic at the University of Dresden Medical School in Germany, did a study in 2009 on just this. He had two groups of anosmics—one that smelled four intense odors (the synthetic equivalents of rose, eucalyptus, lemon, and clove) twice a day for twelve weeks, and the other that did nothing. He tested each group before and after and found that those who practiced, or trained, had a decided increase in their ability to smell. The others? They remained exactly the same.
But beyond the simple exposure to smells, more has been shown to improve recognition and identification. Words, for one. It’s been found that assigning labels for novel scents greatly improves the capacity to learn.
I spoke with Donald Wilson, a senior research scientist at the Nathan S. Kline Institute and also the scientist who worked on the concept of “smound,” about the role the brain plays in the way we smell, in the way I smell, in the way I used to smell. He began simply. Peanut butter, he said, is a smell with thousands of molecules. When intercepted by the olfactory neurons, each of these molecules sends a signal to the brain. The brain does not interpret each of these signals as a separate element, however—it interprets them all as a whole. “If you smelled one molecule alone,” Wilson said, “perhaps it would smell like pineapple. But you would never say that peanut butter smells like pineapple.”
The brain then takes this collection of perceptions and, processing from the top down, puts them together. We make assumptions gleaned from the bits of molecules, the disparate pineapple notes, put together into a cohesive whole—a whole that comes from experience, learning, and training.
I asked Wilson about my inability to process and recognize the scents around me. After my accident, the majority of my olfactory neurons regrew, he said, but it was possible that they did not rewire themselves in exactly the same way. Perhaps there were gaps. It was possible that all of the smells over the years—the ocean, the bananas, the charcoal waft of the summertime grill—were no longer able to be evoked in the same way as they once were. The signals sent to the brain were just a little bit different, the familiar patterns gone. Peanut butter is no longer the same peanut butter as it was before. I would have to relearn them all.
“You can train your olfactory system,” Wilson said. “It’s been shown that if you give a new smell to someone, something that has never been smelled before, he or she will quickly learn to recognize and apply some label to it.” Attention will increase sensitivity to smells, and time and practice will decrease the threshold at which they can be perceived. “The olfactory system is very plastic,” he said. “It learns very quickly. That seems to be maintained throughout life.”
In Grasse, I asked Fauvel what she thought. “Why not?” she asked, as she often did.
AT THE GRASSE INSTITUTE,
we began with lavender.
Fauvel stood at the head of the table and opened the small brown bottle, nestled in her hand like a baby bird. She dipped a small bunch of white paper strips—blotters, we called them—carefully within, so that only their very ends touched the liquid. When removed, she shook them lightly and handed them around the table, one for each of us.
I held the blotter in my hand for a moment before I began, a light sweat already coating my forehead. My classmates had immediately begun to smell, their strip held under their noses parallel to the table like mustaches. They looked comfortable in the act of sniffing, every single one of them, closing their eyes and nodding to some silent voice in their heads. I could hear the breath around the room.
I lifted the blotter and inhaled.
There was an aroma, subtle and flimsy but there nonetheless. An image of tiny blue flowers flitted behind my eyes. I inhaled again deeply, exhaled long. I was unsure of how to pace myself. I tried to act normal.
Lavender oil is a natural, as were all of the scents we would tackle in the first week, Fauvel explained, this one made by the distillation of the flower and stem.
“What do you smell?” she asked, bringing her own blotter under her nose and away, one small breath at a time. She looked around the room. She wanted words to describe. She wanted any words but the one from the label:
lavender
, the only one I knew.
I waved the strip under one nostril and then the other, inhaling again.
I thought of the bright purple bars of soap in my father’s home, the ones collected by my stepmother, Cyndi. I thought of the pillow that had slowly deflated at Alinea those months before, the one under a plate of deconstructed rhubarb, a scientific coda to a symphonic meal.
But I couldn’t find any words to describe this smell, here and now. I had no adjectives, no adverbs, no clue. I looked around the table blankly. My tongue lay heavy in my mouth, like a foreign creature. I began to feel panicked as my classmates called out answers to the air.
Floral?
Herbal?
Warm?
A little spicy? A little green?
Like hay, like men’s cologne, like the fields of Provence. . .
I sat silently, hunched down in my chair.
“Lavender has rustic, camphoraceous notes,” Fauvel said, pointing to the classification table she had handed out, a piece of paper entitled “Basic Natural Raw Materials.” There, sixty raw scents were listed, categorized into larger aromatic families such as spicy, floral, orange, rosy, and resin.
I read the list again and again, trying out the terms silently in my head. Categorizations like these have been used by perfumers—and flavorists—in one form or another for decades, after all. It’s that labeling that will help with recognition, memorization, and description, providing a concrete vocabulary for those in the business and those, like me, peeking in.
As soon as the words used to describe lavender were fed to me, the adverbs and adjectives lodged in my head, I found that I
could
smell them. I understood what Fauvel described. Context, as I had witnessed before, changed the way I picked up on every smell. What I didn’t know: Would I ever be able to come up with these words on my own?
After a few minutes, we smelled the blotter of lavender a second time. I was surprised to find that it had changed. Most materials do, Fauvel explained. Some burst into the nose immediately and leave just as fast, ones like lemon, like orange, like ginger. Those, she said, are called top notes. Middle notes, like geranium and rose, linger but not for the long term. Base notes like sandalwood or musk stick around a while.
The music of perfume,
I thought.
Lavender is a middle note—a heart note, says natural perfumer Mandy Aftel in her book,
Essence & Alchemy
. “Floral heart notes can be combined into voluptuous chords that are sultry, sophisticated, radiant, narcotic, exotic. They bridge the distance between the deep, heavy base notes and the light, sharp top notes, rounding off the rough edges and making the perfume cohere as a whole.” For Fauvel, she explained, lavender begins fresh but then changes quickly. “It gets a little bit warmer,” Fauvel said. I breathed in and out, wondering what the hell that meant. She asked us to notice the herbal elements that came out, “like a touch of hay.”
But, again, with her words, there it was: a lighter, brighter aura to each inhale. The power of suggestion, Grosinger had said.
We smelled sandalwood, which was warm and woody, like a strip of beige tree bark in my mind. When I first lifted the blotter to my nose, I thought there was nothing there, nothing but the faint crawl of liquid at the paper’s end. But, Fauvel reminded me, sandalwood is a base note, the low rhythmic drum of a jazz standard. It can take time to register. And as I inhaled, it slowly crept up through my nose.
“Sandalwood is a linear smell,” Fauvel explained. This one won’t change.
“It’s a well-rounded composition, which makes it rich.” She smiled. “I think it’s magic.”
My classmates from India—the only males in the room, two quiet cousins who wanted to move their career paths from science to scent—nodded knowingly. Sandalwood, they said, is common where they are from. For them, it’s as familiar as home.
We smelled lemon oil, which is made through the cold expression of its zest. It smelled like the pale yellow hard candies I loved to suck on as a child, which came in small silver cans and left a powdery residue on my fingertips. Then there was clove bud oil, spicy and complex, whirring in the back of my throat. I loved it, reminiscent of baking with my mother at Christmas, and was surprised to hear that in this I was largely alone. In France, Fauvel explained, they use clove in the dentist’s office, and the smell is irrevocably tied to drills and tooth decay.
Our whole class ate lunch that day together at a small bistro in town. I picked over my plate of silky scallops St. Jacques as I listened to my classmates’ conversations in English, accents from around the world. The flavors of my food seemed muted in comparison to our morning of such intense scent. I took careful sips of a glass of rosé wine—frosted, baby pink—and could taste little but a florid hint of lavender. The scent seemed now everywhere.
Against the background clink of china and soft chatter of French, everyone around the table spoke of smell. My classmates spoke of their loves for perfume and the first bottles they ever bought. They spoke of handmade soaps and visits to fragrance factories in Provence. They spoke of advertisement campaigns for celebrity scents and the famous perfumer—or “Nose,” as the masters are called in the business—who lived in the hills nearby. I smiled and nodded. I threw in a comment here and there. But I rarely wore perfume. Before the accident, smell had existed for me only on the plane of food and flavor. Even then, there, attending perfume school in the heart of the history of fragrance, I had a hard time understanding such an obsession. I mean, where was the substance? Perfume didn’t nourish like a meal, it didn’t bring people together around the table, not like we were right then. It was a solitary act, an invisible act. Perfume and cooking, it seemed to me, were nothing alike.
But I had to smile as I listened to the chatter. I had thought
I
was obsessed with smell. I had thought there were few people out there in the nonprofessional world as fascinated by the nose as I was. But I saw that I was wrong. My classmate from London, a trained aromatherapist with platinum blond hair and bright purple mascara, told me that she and her husband had purchased a condominium in Grasse to be close to the heartbeat of scent. “It’s always been a dream,” she said.
In the following days—long, bright days spent sitting around the table in the lab—we sniffed these raw materials in eight-hour spurts under the expert guidance of Fauvel. We sniffed them one at a time, slowly and carefully, our noses poised over the strips of smell. We smelled dozens a day. Hundreds with time. We smelled and then discussed, and then smelled again. I took notes on names, on categories and descriptors. I tried to drill them into my memory like the French language flash cards I had attempted, and then discarded, in the weeks before I left for Grasse. It was difficult, and mentally exhausting. Smelling with such precision and concentration seemed to access a different part of my brain—a part long dormant, one that subsumed my energy and left me lying in bed at night asleep not long after the sun went down.
We smelled rose, bergamot, and lavandin, a hybrid lavender plant that yields much more essential oil than the original and, therefore, is more commonly used. We smelled cistus, tuberose, and myrrh. Jasmine absolute was light and floral, bursting in my nose. When Fauvel pointed out that it had a note of indol, with its musky, sexy underside, I could smell that, too. I could smell everything. I could smell it all. I wished I could pick up the phone and call Matt, who given the hour was probably asleep in Afghanistan.
I can smell!
But I wouldn’t let myself rejoice. Not yet.
Recognition remained elusive. My ability to identify a smell without knowing its source was completely gone, its absence slapping me constantly against the cheek. This wasn’t surprising. But it was frustrating. Especially because of the tests. The tests drove me mad.
And Fauvel tested us often. Each day, multiple times a day, she would select a small collection of bottles, their labels hidden from our eyes. She would dip the blotters in, one at a time, and hand them out. Silently, we would sniff. We would think, and then sniff again. We were supposed to identify the unknown scent. We would write down our answer and wait for everyone to finish so that we could compare.
I had a hard time.
For the first test, on the very first day, Fauvel passed out six raw materials that we had smelled earlier that morning.