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Science Coronavirus Coverage U. Travel A road trip in Burgundy reveals far more than fine wine. Travel My Hometown In L. Travel The last artists crafting a Thai royal treasure. Subscriber Exclusive Content. A corpse flower smells like a heady mix of rotten fish, sewage, and dead bodies. Braving a blustery Chicago night, thousands of people lined up Tuesday for a whiff of a corpse flower named Alice at the Chicago Botanic Garden. In fact, the demand to see and smell a corpse flower is so great that botanical gardens now vie to own one.
Gardeners lavish them with care, hoping to force more stinky blooms from a plant whose scent is so rare up to a decade between flowerings and so fleeting eight to 12 hours that visitors are often disappointed to miss peak stench. But why do people want to smell the thing? The reaction is usually the same: the anticipation, the tentative sniff, then the classic scrunched-up face of disgust.
And yet everyone seems happy to be there. Many were common pleasures: the fear of a scary movie, the burn of chili pepper, the pain of a firm massage. And some were disgusting, like popping pimples or looking at a gross medical exhibit. Our sense of disgust, after all, serves a purpose. You know, things like a rotting corpse. Yet our sense of disgust can be particular. Disgust tends to protect us from the threat of others, while we feel fine about our own grossness.
Then there are variations in how we perceive odors. Some smells are good only in small doses, as perfumers know. Musk, for instance, is the base note of many perfumes but is considered foul in high concentrations.
But someone could. I would love to see someone give eau de corpse flower a whirl, if only they can find a headspace vial large enough.
The stench of a corpse flower, after all, is a mix of compounds, including indole and sweet-smelling benzyl alcohol in addition to nasties like trimethylamine, found in rotting fish. At a time when I loved Strawberry Shortcake dolls and scratch-and-sniff stickers, the boys in my class were playing with He-Man dolls. Arab men may also wear perfumes: they use rose and aloewood behind their ears, on their nostrils, in their beards and in the palms of their hands. The African Bushmen would probably regard the olfactory preferences of almost all other cultures, including our supposedly sophisticated Western tastes, as distinctly lacking in subtlety.
For the Bushmen, the loveliest fragrance is that of rain. This is because a perfuming ritual marks the end of every social meal. After the food-trays have been removed and coffee has been served, the host or hostess men and women eat separately will bring out the perfume box.
For women, this contains four to eight bottles of perfume and an incense burner. The bottles are passed around and each guest anoints herself with the different scents on different parts of her body or clothing, using a glass applicator.
Then the incense burner is passed around, allowing each guest to perfume herself with the fragrant fumes. The appearance of the perfume-box signals the end of the visit, and the guests depart as soon as the perfume ritual is completed.
The ritual serves several important social functions. Guests arrive wearing their best perfumes to honour the hostess, and leave honoured in return by the hostess, whose social prestige is enhanced by the pleasant smells she imparts to her guests.
The ritual also promotes a feeling of bonding and unity, in that guests arrive differently-scented, but by the end of the visit are bound together by a shared fragrance. Aromatic shrines or other media, offering up scents for the pleasure of the gods, are an integral part of the rituals of most religions. Hindu temples are scented with sandalwood, and the altars of the Nigerian Songhay are drenched with perfumes. Rites of passage, which mark our transitions from one physical, social or economic condition to another such as the rituals of birth, puberty, marriage and death , also involve the symbolic use of odours in many cultures.
Among the Colombian Desana, for example, a shaman must blow strong-smelling tobacco smoke over a girl on the occasion of her first menstruation, to initiate her as an acceptable member of the civilised, adult community. The complexities of personal odour, of which the average Westerner is largely unaware, are the subject of sophisticated classification systems in many other cultures. Not only is their assessment of the components of personal body odour scientifically accurate, but, unlike Western scientists, the Desana are able to describe each of the smells involved in minute and vivid detail.
In other parts of the Amazonian region, however, 60, Avon ladies are busily engaged in the hut-to-hut selling of deodorants and perfumes. The Smell Report Culture Smell is not just a biological and psychological experience, it is also a social and cultural phenomenon. Western cultures Smell is probably the most undervalued of the senses in modern Western cultures. Here are a few preliminary indications of the forthcoming sensory reshuffle: The study of olfaction, previously of interest only in specialist medical research and experimental psychology, is now attracting ever-increasing numbers of anthropologists, sociologists and historians.
In popular culture, the current aromatherapy-boom indicates a similar revival of interest in the powers of perfume. Scientists insist that there is still no proof of the benefits of aromatherapy, but the fragrances are undeniably pleasant, which may be enough for most ordinary mortals.
The findings of research on olfaction, previously reported only in obscure academic journals, now appear regularly in popular newspapers and glossy magazines.
Even the world of technology, so long obsessed with audio-visual-tactile processes, has recently turned its attention to the mysteries of olfaction see High-tech noses and High-tech smells, above.
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