Nez, the Olfactory Magazine – #19 – Good and Bad

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«Good and evil, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, nice and naughty, truth and lies, the virtuous and the diabolical…
In a society plagued by polarization and growing Manichaeism, neutrality and nuance struggle to find their place. Smells are no exception: Something either smells good or bad, the two categories often being the only alternatives when it comes to describing what we smell. Strangely, in this register, aversion seems to yield a much broader lexical field than inclination. A glance at the thesaurus teaches us that, compared to the few expressions for smelling good – fragrancy, redolence, bouquet – a multitude of words such as stink, stench, pong, reek, funky, skanky, fetid, malodorous, rank, foul, smelly, ripe, noxious, noisome, nauseating, pestilential or mephitic allow us to be much more expressive when it comes to articulating our olfactory disapproval.

In the vocabulary of smell, is expressing beauty, goodness and pleasantness less useful to our survival? Or are we simply insufficiently trained to explore this range of intimate feelings with subtlety, more readily allowing a visceral rejection to burst forth, because it is instinctive and uncontrolled?

When we benefit from an olfactory education, on the other hand, our nose gradually emerges from the usual dichotomy to take on a more benevolent, analytical and less impulsive role as an observer. We thus bypass the primitive functioning of our brain to better understand this invisible, seemingly inaccessible universe. What if learning to listen more closely to smells in order to discern their facets, their reasons for being, the information they convey, was already a way of fighting, on our own scale, against the bipolarization of the world?»

Jeanne Doré (Editor in Chief of Nez)

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