Scents & Sensibility: Our Nose as Our Biggest Art Critics

The other day, my friend bought me a bottle of peach-scented lotion for my birthday. The scent, sweet and combined with floral and fruity undertones, was so fragrant that I could literally picture the light pink fruit in my hands. It smelled delicious—almost like the real thing—that it made my mouth water. So, like any sane person, I decided to taste it (a dumb move to be honest, but in my defense I was curious!). And to my dissatisfaction and immediate regret, it in fact tasted nothing like how it smelled. But why? How does our sense of smell connect to our sensory experience?

The Art of Smell

When asked to picture what “art” is, people tend to visualize a painting – like DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. But art doesn’t just appeal to our eyes; it also appeals to our sense of touch, taste, hearing, and smell. Our sense of smell, often under-appreciated in the realm of art, plays a profound role in enriching our artistic and daily experience. Take perfume or cologne for example, where perfume designers, or perfumers, create olfactory compositions that serve as wearable art, where scents can be used as a form of identity. Like an artist, a perfumer uses a wide selection of “paint” composed of essential oils, natural ingredients like fruit or wood (yes, wood can be used in perfume!), alcohol, synthetic compounds, and other ingredients to create a fragrant masterpiece.

Natural and Synthetic Fragrances

Natural Fragrances, much like their name, are made out of “natural ingredients”, or organic matter such as plants and flowers. Synthetic fragrances on the other hand are derived from chemicals and petroleum byproducts – most of which are produced in a lab. The majority of scented products (lotion, perfume, etc.) usually fall somewhere in the middle, where semi-synthetic fragrances are artificially modified, containing both natural and synthetic ingredients.

Natural fragrances are made from a process called “distillation”, where water is heated under the organic matter to produce steam, which then transports the oils produced by the organic matter to produce an essential oil. Afterwards, an exterior compound is incorporated into the oil to extract fragrant oils from the natural oil – this process is called solvent distillation. The solvent then evaporates to produce a more intensive form of the aroma.

Synthetic fragrances are chemically made to replicate natural scents made from a mix of chemical compounds from aromatic raw materials and natural materials. In the world of fragrance, “synthetic fragrance” is a broad term that umbrellas three types of fragrances: full synthetics, semi-synthetics, and natural isolates.

Full synthetic fragrances are almost entirely made up of petroleum by-products, semi-synthetics are created from synthetic, natural, or artificially modified scents, and natural isolates are developed from synthetic and natural byproducts.

Do You Smell That?

We often underestimate how powerful our sense of smell is, as it’s interlinked with taste, sight, and even memory. Smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, which is located in the temporal lobe. Odors are directly involved with the limbic system (the part of our brain involved with emotional and behavioral responses) and closely located to the hippocampus (responsible for long-term memory formation and retrieval). This is why when we smell something, like the scent of taking a walk outside in a spring morning or freshly baked bread, we can recall a specific memory – often more vividly than sensory cues.

The STEAM Blog