Pod Insights Ologies Literary Olfactology (THE POLITICS OF SMELL) with Ally Louks About this episode Smell and culture. Scent descriptions in novels. Fragrances and class. Stink and stigmas. We cover it all. Scholar, author, and Literary Olfactologist Dr. Ally Louks burst into the zeitgeist in 2024 with her PhD thesis “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics Of Smell In Modern And Contemporary Prose” and we finally got to sit down and talk about the intersection of art and smell and culture. Breathe in the foul, the fragrant, the peppermint, the tobacco, why motel rooms smell the way they do, the forgotten organ that could control your love life, spices at the root of xenophobia, perfume ads that cruised a movement, obscenity trials, explosions, following your first love and getting the last laugh.
Transcript 14,164 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alie Ward? Picture this: years of guaranteed research support and a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you are a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people-not-projects approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at HHMI.org/ologies. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation
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1:26 Alie Ward? patterns across your sleep and stress, activity, and more. So you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at auraring.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Oh, hey, it's the ashtray you used during the quarantine years that you repurposed as a watercolor paint dish. Ally Ward, this is Ologies. This is a subject that none of you know jack shit about, because what even is it? It's great. That's what it is. So this ologist came to my attention after a very, very weird, very public thing that happened to them last fall. And I had so many messages begging me to interview them, and it was not a hard sell. I waited until life calmed down a bit and then got them on the line to chat about what they do. Now, smell and culture.
2:10 Alie Ward? Scent descriptions in novels, fragrances and class stink, stigmas, we cover it all, including their very weird and gripping backstory. So they have a bachelor's in English literature from the University of Exeter and a master's in issues in modern culture from the University College London. They recently completed a PhD at Cambridge University. They're now a supervisor in English Lit at Cambridge. We talk about all kinds of smells and a few are gross, but just hang in there. That's kind of the whole point of this. Also, this isn't our primary olfactology episode. We still need a whole episode about how smell works. But this is a social science, academic, deep, weird dive into how we talk about smells. And I love every minute of this.
2:54 Alie Ward? Boy, howdy, this is a wild ride. It's an instant classic. So we're going to get into it in a second, but first, thank you to patrons who support the show for a dollar a month or more at patreon.com/ologies. Thanks to everyone walking around in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And for no dollars, you can leave a review, of which I read all, including this one from Meha D79, who wrote that Ologies is a perfect example of the ability of passionate, knowledgeable people to make any subject fascinating. Things that I would never have thought could keep my attention, they say, are made into a delicious cocktail, full of facts, stories and humor for my thirsty brain. From string theory to asking if scallops have buttholes. Meha D79, thank you for celebrating our essence. Also, if you don't celebrate it because you don't like swear words or you need to listen
3:38 Alie Ward? with your kids, we have shorter, classroom-safe, G-rated episodes and a spinoff show called Smologies. It's hours and hours of free entertainment wherever you get podcasts. Also, you can find a whole catalog of our 400-plus regular Ologies episodes, anywhere you get podcasts, or just by hitting up ologies.com where they're all organized. Okay, so let's get into this episode and wait around for their absolutely bonkers life story. And toward the end, they make a revelation about them that shocked me. It left me gagged. So hang tight, breathe in deep, the foul, the fragrant, the peppermint, the tobacco, why motel rooms smell the way they do, the forgotten org-
4:20 Alie Ward? That could control your love life, spices at the root of xenophobia, perfume ads that cruised a movement, obscenity trials, explosions, following your first love and getting the last laugh with scholar, author and literary olfactologist Dr. Ali Lukes.
4:57 Speaker 02 I am Ali Lukes and I use she/her pronouns.
5:02 Alie Ward? And Dr. Ali Lukes, correct?
5:05 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. Honestly, other people care more about whether people use my title than I do.
5:15 Speaker 02 But it has kind of become a bit of a persona.
5:18 Alie Ward? Yes.
5:18 Speaker 02 So I do quite like being able to say Dr. Ali Lukes. It's still a novelty to me.
5:24 Alie Ward? Do you remember off the top of your head the full title of your PhD?
5:28 Speaker 02 My gosh, I definitely do. It's "Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose."
5:37 Alie Ward? And you have a bound thesis of it.
5:40 Speaker 02 Yes.
5:40 Alie Ward? As one does, right? I do not have a PhD, but you get it bound. You have the work that you've been working on for several years in a volume. And there it is.
5:51 Speaker 02 Yes, it's kind of like a book. I mean, it's book length. So it feels like it ought to be a tangible thing that you can interact with after it's been a Word document for the best part of four years.
6:05 Alie Ward? And have you always been a big reader, I imagine? Like, what was your childhood like? Were you just curled up in the most adorable reading nook with like a stack of library books?
6:16 Speaker 02 Yes, basically. I read in a very self-directed way from a very young age. And yeah, books have basically been my life, my entire life.
6:28 Alie Ward? When did you start to realize that literature would be the focus of your career? Was there a point where you said, oh, I can continue to study this and teach this? Or were you like, I just don't want to put books down and I'm going to keep going as far as I can take this?
6:43 Speaker 02 Um, kind of both, I suppose. When I was applying for university, I was really stuck about whether to apply for philosophy or English.
6:54 Alie Ward? Mm hmm.
6:54 Speaker 02 And I've always had kind of one foot in each discipline, kind of melded the two by working on ethics in literature. I could look into philosophy if I wanted to, or critical and cultural theory and history. And that's something that I love about English literature is that it allows you to amalgamate a lot of different things, which is great. And I love stories. They kind of give meaning to my life. So I couldn't possibly give that up. And I I feel very privileged that I've managed to spend pretty much a decade making stories my life's work.
7:30 Alie Ward? What a dream. Was there a particular book that sort of really ignited your curiosity about how smell is portrayed? Was there one in particular where you kept noticing it as a theme or?
7:41 Speaker 02 Yes, but I had to become interested in smell before I could notice it.
7:47 Alie Ward? Oh.
7:47 Speaker 02 So I became interested in smell in the second year of my undergraduate degree. Because I took a creative writing module where we had to create a poetry collection around a particular theme. And I chose the theme of perfume because I'd become really interested in the conceptual qualities of perfume advertisements. How, you know, when you would watch a television advert for a perfume, it never seemed to mention the smell of the perfume.
8:20 Speaker 03 Be the man of today, fast bottled.
8:24 Alie Ward? That's so true.
8:25 Speaker 02 It would always kind of try and sell you like a lifestyle or a feeling. And I started looking at like advertisement copy on websites that sold perfume, like Diptyque, for instance. And the authors of those advertisements would have to contend with this like linguistic restrictions surrounding smell. Like we don't have a particularly developed olfactory vocabulary in English. And so. It meant that it created really interesting writing. It became kind of synesthetic and evocative. And then, once I was interested in smell, I started seeing it everywhere.
9:06 Speaker 02 Like, whenever I was reading, it was kind of like suddenly jumping out at me, whereas before I probably would have just not really noticed, like most other people when they read. And the first book that I really started working on at length in relation to smell was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
9:26 Alie Ward? Heads up, this isn't much of a spoiler, but in the 1955 book Lolita, this is a classic work of fiction. It involves a man obsessed with young girls, who he calls Nymfets. And he is enraptured with a 12-year-old named Dolores, nicknamed Dolly or Lolita. And he becomes her stepfather, he sexually assaults and abuses her. It's horrifying. But based on decades of cultural references and movie adaptations, you probably already knew that plot. So when you see mentions in the news of a private plane named the Lolita Express, there's a little context.
9:59 Speaker 02 And, I mean, most people who have read Lolita would not really be aware of the smell content in that book. But I promise, if you were to go away and reread it or read it for the first time with smell in mind, you would realize that it is absolutely fundamental to the story.
10:18 Alie Ward? Really? Like, what types of things jumped out to you?
10:21 Speaker 02 So initially, like, within the first few pages, we discover that Humbert Humbert, this horrible fiendish narrator, was actually a perfume advertiser.
10:33 Alie Ward? No.
10:33 Speaker 02 As in his previous career.
10:35 Alie Ward? Ah.
10:36 Speaker 02 It says that he worked in advertising for his uncle's perfume company.
10:42 Alie Ward? No way.
10:43 Speaker 02 And what I suggest, when I talk about Lolita and when I write about it, is that actually the whole novel becomes a kind of perfume advertisement for Dolores. And for the kind of, the Nymfet creature that Humbert Humbert kind of creates in his head as this demonic race of... Little girls who have this incredible magical power.
11:07 Speaker 04 Gross.
11:08 Speaker 02 And when I I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Lolita and I actually included little smell samples.
11:16 Alie Ward? Oh, that's amazing.
11:18 Speaker 02 For each of the sections of the thesis, based on the smells in the novel.
11:23 Alie Ward? What types of samples were they? What types of notes do they have?
11:26 Speaker 02 So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the things that Humbert Humbert says of Dolores Hayes is that she smells like chestnuts, roses and peppermint.
11:36 Alie Ward? Oh, that's specific.
11:38 Speaker 02 Which is actually a very complicated smell. And he also adds on to that, you know, as the smell of a very special French perfume as well.
11:47 Alie Ward? So Humbert writes a poem in the book that reads, Dolly, my folly, her eyes were ver and never closed when I kissed her. Know an old perfume called Soleil Verre? Are you from Paris, mister? And Humbert describes this old perfume as the, quote, very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use. And it's suspected by readers of the book to have notes of anise and fennel and absinthe, hence the green. And its name, Soleil Verre, it translates to green sun. Now, this perfume, I looked, doesn't actually exist. But a fascinating fact, I went down a rabbit hole on the 1966 Harry Harrison sci fi novel about the threat of overpopulation. It was called Make Room, Make Room. It was
12:28 Alie Ward? adapted into the movie Soylent Green. In the book, soylent is a portmanteau of soy and lentil, but in France, the movie is titled Soleil Verre. So perhaps Harry Harrison was a Namako fan, or just really liked fictitious French perfumes.
12:45 Speaker 02 So we've got this special French perfume, plus all of these kind of incongruous notes. And I also included, towards the end, where there's this section about Humbert Humbert's own smell.
12:57 Alie Ward? Mm hmm.
12:58 Speaker 02 Where he kind of describes himself as, in his moments of moral clarity, if there are any, he kind of describes himself as this horrible, stinking beast. And so I included a sample of Secretion Magnifique, which is this horrible.
13:15 Speaker 02 Some people actually quite like it, but I find it really repulsive. This horrible kind of niche perfume, which is supposed to smell like bodily fluids and like blood and that kind of thing. So the intended effect was for it to evoke in the examiners the kind of moral repulsion that Nabokov is trying to evoke in the reader.
13:36 Alie Ward? Oh, that's brilliant. How did your advisors and how did the committee react to that?
13:41 Speaker 02 They loved it. They really did. It got a, yeah, an incredibly high mark, I think, probably just because it was so unique. I can't imagine that many other people have ever scented their dissertation.
13:53 Alie Ward? I picture those kind of folios in magazines where you can fold back the little flap and then scratch and sniff, you know?
14:03 Speaker 02 I love that kind of thing.
14:05 Alie Ward? I think they took them out of a lot of magazines, which I'm bummed about. I used to rub them on my wrists and neck and be like, free perfume, I'll take it.
14:13 Alie Ward? Okay, I looked into this and for decades, it's been known that those really delicious perfume samples in magazines have been an issue for folks with asthma and allergies. There was a 1995 study titled Inhalation Challenge Effects of Perfume Scent Strips in Patients with Asthma, and it confirmed that chest tightness and wheezing occurred in nearly 21% of asthmatic patients after perfume challenges. But with the decline in sales for print publishing and more people just taking fashion inspo from whatever isn't being shamed as millennial on TikTok, magazine sales and thus ad sales have fallen. And so that's really been the driving factor of why we can't sniff Vogue as much.
14:57 Alie Ward? Although those in the perfume industry do give the heads up that in April and May, before Mother's Day, and in December, before the gift giving frenzy of the holidays, you might be able to smell more magazines. There might be some more perfume ad revivals in them, if you miss them.
15:14 Alie Ward? And what about some other smells in novels and in poetry? The way that people are portrayed, do you find that that goes through their bodily smells or their food smells or their perfumes? Like what types of notes? What do those notes draw on a lot?
15:34 Speaker 02 Gosh, big question. The nice thing about literature is that very often it kind of replicates, but also intensifies life. So all of those things can be found in literature. Um, you know, comments on people's bodily smells, comments on people's food, especially when that food is kind of new to someone. The whole point of smell really is for us to notice new things in our environment. So my former supervisor, Steve Connor, says that smell is the sense of discrimination. It helps us distinguish the ripe from the rotten and the good from the bad. And that's its kind of function for us. So very often in real life, as in literature,
16:20 Speaker 02 smell kind of acts as a way of sometimes othering people, but also kind of registering discomfort with the otherness of people and their weird ways and behaviours and foods.
16:35 Alie Ward? Did you have to talk to any olfactologists about the olfactory bulb and its role in memory and the hippocampus? Like, I understand that we can't really identify smells unless we have something in our memory to compare them to, or kind of a simile. Like, how are smells processed in the brain?
16:57 Speaker 02 Oh my gosh, that really is a big question. So, okay. I know more about smell science than I do any other kind of science, that's for sure. So smell has this very unique relationship to parts of the brain that really evoke, you know, memory and emotion and association as well, the hippocampus. And one of the things about smell is that it doesn't go through the same kind of processing as other sensory perceptions. So when we smell something, it evokes very visceral, immediate responses.
17:35 Speaker 02 And then another thing about smell and memory is that the brain can store away olfactory memories, basically indefinitely. And particularly if they're related to kind of key moments, especially in our childhood, but also just in our lives in general, they become very visceral triggers for certain feelings and memories. So as humans, we're very good at associative learning. So if something has the same kind of qualities as something else, then we're quite good at at kind of thinking, oh, OK, that has a kind of eggy compound, which I know is associated with gas.
18:18 Speaker 02 And therefore, I should be concerned by this particular smell. People have quite a strong reaction to the smell of sulfur, for instance, even though the smell of sulfur doesn't really cause us any physical harm. It has components in it that we associate with, you know, the kind of gas itself is odorless, but they will put in a chemical to make us aware of it, that kind of eggy, sulfurous, horrible smell.
18:47 Alie Ward? Yeah, that kind of gas. Gotcha. OK, so this is called, very simply, gas odorization. And it's added to natural gas and propane so we know when something might blow up and kill us. Now, why do we do this? Because when pipelines were filled with these naturally colorless, odorless gases, things blew up and killed us. And in one 1937 explosion in Texas, nearly 300 kids and their teachers died. After that, someone said, let's make this stinky so people notice. So what notes you might notice when you leave a Bunsen burner unlit and you start to panic are tetrahydrothiazene, which lends a garlic-like stench.
19:28 Alie Ward? While mercaptans, which are delightful little sulf Hydral groups bonded to a carbon atom, they lend it the classic timeless rotten egg smell. And then rounding out the fragrance profile are additional sulfides that just keep the stench lingering. Now, why the sulfides? Why do those get our attention? OK, hydrogen sulfide. It's already present in nature in both rotting eggs and the guy next to you on the plane who just cannot hold it in. You know, he's trying.
19:58 Speaker 02 And so when we associate that smell with anything else in the world, even if it's not quite the same smell, we know to be suspicious of it.
20:05 Alie Ward? Yeah.
20:06 Speaker 02 But also slightly related, I think, but I'm on a slight tangent. Smell is the only sense that we can create new, completely new sensory perceptions for. So like, you can't imagine a new color, for instance.
20:22 Alie Ward? Yes.
20:23 Speaker 02 It's not possible. But for smell, because we've gotten so good at synthetic perfumery, we can create entirely new smells that nobody has ever smelled before, which I think is pretty remarkable.
20:35 Alie Ward? I too think it's cool as hell and it's worth the hyper focus.
20:39 Alie Ward? I took Latin in high school and the word perfume always delighted me, just that it's through smoke, you know, it's meaning being through smoke. Do you find a lot of historical texts that talk about things like, you know, incense and the smells of churches and smoke? Do you find that as time goes on, those references change a little bit?
21:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, incense firstly was the kind of earliest way in which we produced perfumes, or at least produced fragrances. And incense are these naturally occurring materials that when burned release their fragrance. It used to be absolutely fundamental to especially practices related to religion. But it was also, you know, since antiquity, used in the households, like personal household altars. It became kind of synonymous with offerings to the gods. Perhaps the most special kind of offering because it offered a kind of proximity to
21:44 Speaker 02 the divine because smell is taken into the body. And so it offers that kind of connection.
21:50 Alie Ward? And in our mummyology episode about mummies, we cover how the wealthiest ancient Egyptians just spent a grip of cash to preserve their corpses with this sticky goo of herbs and aromatics. So not only did this goo get them safely to the afterlife, but it also landed their bodies and bandages in 19th century apothecaries as vials of powdered mummy became a prized item for people. Just a little dusting of the dead with a botanical earthy bouquet to heal what ails you. Now, a little less divine if I can just back this thing up, so to speak.
22:28 Alie Ward? Oh, I was gonna say, you know, you're mentioning sulfur and gas. I don't feel like I've read any passages about farting in any book. Does it come up? I mean, considering how part of the human condition it is, why don't we, why don't we read more about that?
22:45 Speaker 02 Well, okay, one answer is that censorship was a thing for a long time.
22:52 Alie Ward? It was too sexy. It's too sexy.
22:55 Speaker 02 You know, if you were to take, for example, James Joyce's Ulysses, which obviously was kind of heavily condemned for being too erotic and obscene.
23:04 Alie Ward? Okay, so this 1920 novel by the Irish author James Joyce, it is a whopper at 700 pages. It's a dense one, but wanting to buck Irish conservatism at the time, Joyce made it real juicy, exploring themes of love and sex in the bushes and even wanking it. And it was published in these serialized chapters via one literary magazine in the US, which landed the publishers in court. And at one point, a passage involving someone nutting was going to be read in the court, but the judge objected because there were ladies present. And the lawyers were like, the ladies are the publishers of the magazine. And the judge famously said that they probably just didn't understand what they had printed.
23:48 Alie Ward? But yeah, that trial was a big one and the publishers were found guilty and they were charged a fine of like a hundred bucks. So why was it so sensual and bodily and threatening to the general public in the eyes of the law?
24:01 Speaker 02 Partly because of certain scenes that revolved around smell. You know, there's this kind of much quoted scene that became prominent in the trial for Ulysses, the obscenity trial, where Bloom is seated above his own rising smell on the toilet. He's reading newspaper.
24:23 Alie Ward? To be fair, this scene was set in an outhouse, so rising smells, like a poltergeist, are likely not subtle. But at the time, rising smells never made cameos.
24:34 Speaker 02 And that absolutely shocked people, even though it's a super mundane thing. You know, everybody at some point in their day or week, depending on how much fibre you eat, is sat on the toilet above their own rising smell. But people were like, you cannot possibly put that in literature. I mean, I think we're experiencing more bodily realism in contemporary literature now. I've certainly read some quite...
25:09 Alie Ward? Vivid?
25:10 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. Good word. Vivid descriptions of bodily processes in literature kind of produced in the last 20 years or so.
25:21 Alie Ward? Any passages you want to shout out? Any passages of smell in books that really made you go, holy shit, wow?
25:30 Speaker 02 So, there's a book called Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, and it has a great cover, which has kind of been emblazoned on my brain. It's like bright pink with an avocado on the front. And the entire story revolves around a woman who is hospitalized because a cyst near her anus has gotten infected.
25:56 Alie Ward? I don't like that.
25:57 Speaker 02 And she requires surgery to get it fixed. And it becomes very clear how this could have occurred to this woman who does not abide by standard hygiene practices at all.
26:09 Alie Ward? Interesting.
26:11 Speaker 02 And so that, I think, would have absolutely scandalized Joyce's readership
26:21 Speaker 02 in ways that I don't think they could possibly have imagined at the time.
26:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a good and interesting book, but it definitely tests the boundaries of what can be considered pleasurable reading.
26:34 Alie Ward? If this was gross for you, I get it. You can see our disgustology episode to learn more about how your brain is protecting you by retching. Now, if you loved it, we do have a colonoscopy how to episode for you, and we have one on how zoologists analyze freezers full of animal scat. Okay, so we're through most of the gnarliest parts of this episode. We're good. Let's get to other aromas. Let's get to good ones. What about pheromones? Do you find that that smell of attraction, I mean, to flip it on the other side, is used in a lot of romance novels or a lot of like very erotic scenes? Do you find that they use smell to make things more physical?
27:13 Speaker 02 Yes, definitely. Smell is a really, really important part of the romance genre in general. You know, you have characters who have their kind of characteristic smells, often which are typically masculine or feminine, depending on the gender of the character. And yes, I think smell is a way to signal a kind of desire and attraction that is difficult to explain through reason. And I think we're all intrigued by that. I think that's why so many people are interested in the notion of pheromones. And I'm kind of actually a little bit invested in the existence of pheromones.
27:51 Speaker 02 Now, in general, we have not got any evidence really that human pheromones exist and that we are able to detect them. It kind of makes sense that they would exist because they exist in other primates, like other mammals.
28:04 Alie Ward? Yeah.
28:05 Speaker 02 But we have spent decades and decades and like a lot of scientific resources trying to work out whether pheromones exist in humans and whether we can perceive them. And nobody has come up with any hard and fast evidence that is replicable. Yeah, it's still very much up in the air.
28:23 Alie Ward? Up in the air, oh my word, bless her for that. Also, in terms of human pheromones, according to the textbook Neurobiology of Chemical Communication, Chapter 19, titled Human Pheromones, do they exist? They say, "Like all vertebrates, humans excrete or secrete many different chemicals, be it their urine and anal excrement, breath, genitalia, saliva, and skin glands." And I just realized, I told you guys that we were through with most of the gross parts, but human smells are human smells. Okay, so it continues. "Most proponents of the human pheromone concept assume that skin glands are the source of the active pheromonal agents, and all three major skin glands, two sweat and one
29:06 Alie Ward? sebaceous or oil, can produce chemicals that become odorous." So why can't we smell love, then? Is this why online dating is just such a crapshoot? And we should just go back to having dances where you only have to twirl around someone for the length of one song to know if you want to see him naked? Well, there's this 2023 paper, "The Clinical Significance of the Human Vomero-Nasal Organ", in the Journal of Surgical Radiologic Anatomy, confirms that, yes, there has been a longstanding debate on the presence and the functionality of the vomero-nasal organ, also known, let's just call it a VNO, because it's hard to pronounce, or a Jacobson organ, in adult humans.
29:47 Alie Ward? And this paper, for sinus surgeons, warns that if the VNO is a functional organ in humans, it would be important to preserve the organ during nasal surgery. And there's apparently a little pit in the sinuses that could be like a portal to it. But the paper concludes that the human VNO is probably a vestigial organ with a non-operational sensory function. So it's okay if you accidentally hack it off in an operation. But we do have a great episode with an ethnosynologist about the current and the ancient role of dogs in human life, as well as an eco-odorology episode about how dogs are better at detecting ecological samples than machines. And in it, we discuss the Jacobson organ in dogs.
30:33 Alie Ward? And why, when your pup smells or tastes something, it might make like a chomping puppet movement with its mouth to shove the air up into their vomero nasal organ. In my home, when our goblin dog Grammy does this, when she tastes something new, we call this doing the thing. She's doing the thing. But back to romance, though. For more on the smell's role in romance, we have a Philimetology episode two about kissing with the famed biological anthropologist, Dr. Robin Dunbar, who told me that when you kiss, you're tasting a partner's immune system. And the people you like tend to be people who have a different set of immune genes to the ones that you have. And that episode delves into hundreds and thousands of years of evolutionary anthropological evidence. But it happened to come out,
31:18 Alie Ward? we released that one a week after the world shut down for COVID, which was just honestly such cruel fate. But we'll link it in the show notes.
31:27 Alie Ward? I know that they did some sniff tests of body odors that are different genetically from you are more attractive. I mean, a good insurance that you don't fall too in love with your cousin, I guess. But have you seen that research where they put
31:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
31:43 Alie Ward? dirty t-shirts in jars?
31:45 Speaker 02 Yes, the sweaty t-shirt experiment. Yeah. It's separable from pheromones because pheromones are like a very specific thing. So one thing about pheromones is that in other animals, they have something called the vomero nasal organ, which allows them to detect pheromones. So pheromones aren't strictly speaking smells, but they are kind of chemical compounds that different species will use to communicate messages about their sexual availability or their emotional state, et cetera. But they're not technically smells. They're not perceived through the nose, per se. They're perceived
32:25 Speaker 02 through this vomero nasal organ, which we don't have at all. We do when we're in the womb, but then it stops working practically straight away after birth.
32:35 Alie Ward? Oh, what a bummer. I wanted that. I grew that. Come on.
32:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. We've been robbed of our vomero nasal organs.
32:47 Speaker 02 All of this is where you get the, no, you know what? It's too early. Although we have already been talking about anal cysts and farting.
32:56 Speaker 02 But.
32:59 Speaker 02 This is, it's always the way it goes, isn't it?
33:01 Alie Ward? We cover it head to toe. And you know, do you find that in literature, they look to smell to really explore grief a lot? Do you find that that comes up a lot? Because I know that if you smell a perfume of someone who's passed away, or if you have a shirt of someone who's broken up with you, those smells, they can be so reminiscent. I know that they obviously can convey disgust and attraction and nostalgia. But do you find that grief comes up a lot?
33:29 Speaker 02 Yes, definitely. The text that automatically comes to mind is a novel by James Kurtzier, who is the author of Disgrace, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But one of his lesser known novels is called The Master of Petersburg. And it's a kind of fictionalized account of Dostoevsky's life. And at the beginning of the novel, we see this fictionalized Dostoevsky enter the room of his recently deceased son. And he kind of picks up various things in the room to smell them. He like, he smells his pillow. He even smells the armpit seam in one of his son's suits
34:12 Speaker 02 and kind of philosophizes on how his kind of ghost is entering him and is perhaps gaining life again through that experience of kind of being revived through smell.
34:26 Alie Ward? Oh, that's such a beautiful passage.
34:27 Speaker 02 It is, but also the book itself is, is really, really horrible. It's all about corruption and that particular scene gets very perverse very quickly.
34:40 Alie Ward? Does it?
34:41 Speaker 02 But it starts off, it starts off nice.
34:44 Alie Ward? Do you ever have people who ask for copies of your PhD? Can you go buy it?
34:48 Speaker 02 Crazy.
34:49 Alie Ward? Is that a big yes?
34:50 Speaker 02 I feel so bad about this because there is someone at the University of Cambridge who now spends a portion of every single one of their working days pressing a button on their computer to send me requests of my thesis. And I have apologized to them multiple times. I'm really sorry, Tony. Like, I could never have anticipated this.
35:15 Alie Ward? How many people have requested it? Do you have any idea?
35:18 Speaker 02 Well, over 3,000.
35:21 Alie Ward? What? But in a victory for Tony.
35:25 Speaker 02 I can't actually send anyone my thesis. I feel like I should say this because I know that people will probably send me an email and say, can I have a copy of your thesis? I can't because it's under embargo.
35:37 Alie Ward? OK.
35:38 Speaker 02 Because I'm, I'm turning it into, well, two books, actually. I mean, I'm turning the thesis into a, an academic literary monograph. And I'm also writing a trade book about smell.
35:49 Alie Ward? Amazing.
35:50 Speaker 02 This is, you know, an unprecedented situation. But because there are so many people interested in the work, it actually makes a lot of sense. And the advice that I've received is to keep it under wraps for now.
36:02 Alie Ward? Good, OK. Love that. So let's get into the absolutely boggling twists of destiny that led Ally to be talking to me in between writing two different books about the niches of subjects. My God. So what exactly happened?
36:19 Speaker 02 Sure. Yeah. OK. So I had just finished a very long day of teaching. And on my lunch break, I had taken this picture of myself with my hardbound copy of my thesis, ready to deposit in the university library, because that's the kind of final hurdle that you have to get through for your PhD to be done, basically. I had picked up my two copies of my thesis. I put one in the university library and I got my personal copy. And I took a photo with it and I put it on Twitter. Well, X, formerly Twitter. I kind of think of them as slightly separate things now because the version of Twitter that I was used to.
37:01 Alie Ward? Yeah.
37:01 Speaker 02 To talk to people in my field whilst we were all in lockdown. Just no longer exists.
37:08 Alie Ward? Yeah.
37:09 Speaker 02 It's a very different platform now than it was back then.
37:12 Alie Ward? So this was a tweet she posted in late November 2024 with the caption, thrilled to say I passed my Viva with no corrections and am officially PH done. And in the tweet's photo, she's like happily cradling a yearbook sized volume. It's hard bound in this deep crimson color with foiled gold lettering. And it reads olfactory ethics, the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose.
37:37 Speaker 02 It's cool. So basically I put it on there because I was used to using it to talk to my not very many at all followers who are basically all academics. And I thought I should let them know that I'm done in case they're working on any projects that need a postdoc. And then they'll think of me.
37:56 Alie Ward? Hey, are you guys hiring?
37:58 Speaker 02 And then it kind of broke containment immediately. I guess for the first 24 hours, actually, maybe even best part of 48 hours, it was like skyrocketing in terms of the engagement. But the people who were commenting were really friendly. They were just congratulating me on my accomplishment, which was very nice. And I really appreciated it, even though it was slightly discomforting to have that many people seeing my face.
38:28 Alie Ward? So people just said, whoa, that's fascinating. Who knew? Congrats on that. And then?
38:32 Speaker 02 And then it got retweeted by a couple of kind of big right wing accounts who were, I suppose, not necessarily criticizing it, more kind of mocking it or mocking me or the institution at large. And then it got nasty for a little while. It kind of was bouncing around a side of the platform that I had never encountered before. And the comments were unhinged.
39:05 Speaker 02 And a lot of them gained quite a lot of traction. You know, they became the kind of most liked ones because it was kind of blue tick people interacting with each other because they get money from that.
39:17 Alie Ward? Mm hmm. Yeah. Within a week, this post had nearly 120 million views. In the grab bag of responses were a lot of male avatar photos, clearly triggered, saying things such as, what a stupid fucking thing to study. And you have made no valuable contributions in your thesis and perhaps your entire life. Another said, instead of a baby, you spent three years producing junk. Three years becoming less intelligent. What a wasted life. Another claimed, you should be deported to Haiti. I don't know why they wrote that because she doesn't live in the US. But Ali also relayed to one media outlet, quote, I did receive one rape threat in my
39:59 Alie Ward? personal inbox, which I felt really significantly crossed the line because my email was not readily available on the internet. So that person had to go to some trouble to find it, just in case you wanted a peek into what it's like being a non male gender on the internet. You probably already knew.
40:15 Speaker 02 And then people started defending me and it was like some kind of strange culture war going on with me at the center baffled. Thinking actually that a lot of it was very, very funny. Apart from the like crazy threats to my life, et cetera. A lot of the comments were very, very funny because they were so far fetched. They were like worlds away from reality, which was quite entertaining for me. And it's a bit stressful.
40:48 Alie Ward? And do you feel like this is part of a wave? And maybe this is mostly American of just anti-intellectualism, anti so-called like elitism. I mean, did you find that that that was part of the center of that culture war? Was a lot of Americans too?
41:04 Speaker 02 It was, yeah.
41:05 Alie Ward? Yeah, mostly Americans.
41:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, okay. It was a lot of Americans who thought that I was American.
41:10 Alie Ward? Oh, my God.
41:10 Speaker 02 I think they thought maybe I was from Cambridge, Massachusetts or.
41:18 Speaker 02 People out there in our nation don't have that. And they just didn't really think very hard at all. There were a lot of comments about, you know, using federal funds. But I'm, I'm British. Oh, my God. So that's not, that's not a problem for you guys. Don't worry about it. Yeah, it definitely kind of struck a chord with that particular, particular kind of anti-intellectual slash kind of just straightforwardly misogynistic group of people. There was a lot of just like, women should be in the kitchen. Oh, my God. As if we're back in, you know, well, 1950.
41:56 Alie Ward? She quickly gained 238,000 followers and interest from literary agents all over the world. And one scholar of literary studies, Dr. Mushthak Bilal, proclaimed that Dr. Ali Luke's PhD thesis is set to become one of the most influential theses of the 21st century. And the funny thing is, is like, booyah, you have like a book deal. Like more people interested in this work than ever. This, so many people didn't realize that this work even existed. I had so many people being like, get her on Ologies, get her on Ologies. And I'm like, she is busy right now. And our listeners were very stoked that you're coming on. And I have questions for them. Can I ask?
42:40 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
42:41 Alie Ward? Okay.
42:41 Speaker 02 Yes, I would love to answer questions.
42:43 Alie Ward? But before that strikes, let's take a quick break and donate to a cause of Dr. Luke's selection, which this week is the UN Crisis Relief, specifically the Occupied Palestinian Territory Humanitarian Fund, which is managed locally under UN leadership and immediately available to a wide range of partner organizations at the front lines of response. And this way, funding reaches the people most in need when they need it. And for more on the conflict and Gaza and the humanitarian crisis we're all seeing unfold, you can listen to my 2024 chat with Dr. Dirk Moses, who's a leading global expert on genocide. That episode is titled Genocideology. And in it, we talk about crimes of atrocity and yes, the nature of genocide.
43:25 Alie Ward? So that donation went to UN Crisis Relief, specifically for the Occupied Palestinian Territory Humanitarian Fund. And on a side note, several separate Ologies donations were made this week directly to families in need who are suffering aid blockades and starvation in Gaza. Again, highly recommend the Genocideology episode. This episode of Ologies with Ali Ward is brought to you by Alloy Health. Menopause, it's inevitable. It's also treatable. This is where Alloy comes in. You're like, what is this? It's a digital health platform, right? It connects you with a menopause specialized doctor. They exist. They're available. Everything is done online. No waiting for an appointment. You don't have to wait in line at the pharmacy. If you've listened to my field trip mystery surgery episode,
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48:36 Alie Ward? And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, let's get back to smelling stuff and let's take in the essence of your questions. Amy Ford Rosa and Robin Coon asked about vocabulary. Amy asked, could you speak on the emotional baggage of the word smell versus scent versus odor versus stink? They each have different meanings that I'm interested that you used smell for your thesis instead of scent.
49:03 Speaker 02 Yes, okay. So the word that I use most often in the thesis is olfactory, because I think that it is probably the most value-neutral. I think it's definitely the most value-neutral, actually, of all of the smell terms. I think smell is supposed to be value-neutral, but actually in practice has negative connotations.
49:24 Alie Ward? Yeah, I can understand that.
49:26 Speaker 02 If someone says, what's that smell?
49:27 Alie Ward? Yes, yeah.
49:29 Speaker 02 Like, the chances are they're probably talking about something negative.
49:33 Speaker 04 Smell you later.
49:35 Alie Ward? Right.
49:35 Speaker 02 And in general, in the English language, anyway, we have this very bifocated olfactory lexicon, like the words that we use to describe smell fit into two categories, the kind of foul and the fragrant. And that's Alan Corban's kind of way of thinking about it.
49:51 Alie Ward? So this is Professor of History Alain Corban's classic 1986 work, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, which explores personal sense in the 17 and 1800s. And I can only imagine what a richly aromatic time it was in France. As the first words read, "Today's history comes deodorized."
50:14 Alie Ward? And it's of course not just history, it's also the present. Just a few months ago, a French and a British tennis star faced off in a match with the Brit, who was behind in the match, requesting an intervention from the umpire, saying on camera, can you tell her to wear deodorant? She's smelling really bad. Now, that player, Team Britain, lost the match anyway and then had to issue a retraction and an apology on social media for the insensitivities toward the lait de tennis.
50:44 Speaker 02 In general, the words that we have to talk about negative smells are pretty overprovided, I would say. Like, we have a lot of finely differentiated words for negative smells and not very many, really, for positive ones.
51:01 Alie Ward? So I consulted at the source and sure enough, unpleasant odors can be noxious, putrid, revolting, malodorous, rank, smelly, rotten, stenchey, stinking, stinky and reeking. But it's not often you smell something that you would describe as ambrosial or redolent. This is why Dr. Lukes, who wrote a PhD and now two books about it, is a pro.
51:24 Speaker 02 It's kind of become a little language game that I'm very familiar with and I'm good at playing.
51:30 Alie Ward? And a few people, Fran, Izzy B and Erin White, wanted to know about food. And Fran said, why do so many white Americans, especially, claim to hate the smell of garlic or garlic breath? They've never noticed anyone with bad garlic breath and garlic is delicious. However, coffee breath is terrible. And Izzy B wanted to know, I'm curious about if there's connections between the smells of cultural cuisines, mentioned Indian or Mexican cuisine, for example, or diet culture and racism, classism, other prejudices. So yeah, the different smells of different types of cuisine and how that gets mentioned.
52:07 Speaker 02 Oh, gosh, there's so much, so much interesting stuff there. So I've actually read, not recently, but read quite a lot of academic work on the smell of garlic and the kind of particular socio-political and historical situations in which
52:25 Speaker 02 People being averse to the smell of garlic arises and how it relates to not always necessarily racism, but certainly xenophobia.
52:34 Alie Ward? Mm hmm.
52:35 Speaker 02 So against, for example, Italians, I think is maybe the most obvious now, but also the Jewish community where garlic and onions were used in their kind of traditional cooking.
52:46 Alie Ward? Okay, so I'm mostly Italian, like 75%. So I honestly did not know that the waft of simmering onions or garlic could possibly be perceived poorly. Like, what else does food taste like?
52:59 Speaker 05 I do like it. I like it very much. I think, did we add salt and pepper? I think we needed salt and pepper. No, there's no salt and pepper in it.
53:09 Alie Ward? And there's this 2016 paper out of the History Department of King's College, London, titled Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in 18th-Century English Culture. And it notes that at the heart of bristling at a so-called difference in odor was essentially the fear of otherness. And given our two-part vampirology episode about Eastern European folklore and garlic as a repellent for the undead, there were likely deep fears and associations made with certain food smells. And the paper mentions that, under oppression, any group associated with poverty is associated with contamination.
53:46 Speaker 02 It brought up this enormous discourse about the smell of garlic, and it became this kind of foundational derogatory feature of that group and became a bit of a trope, basically. So that's that. Coffee breath. Coffee breath reminded me of this novel called Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers, who writes so wonderfully about the smells associated with the commute, kind of the work commute, and the like, long incubated farts and like, dehydrated spit. And like, it's incredibly, like, just so precise, the way he's able to evoke these
54:30 Speaker 02 particular smells. And I think, you know, stale coffee breath is one of those things that he locates as well, as a kind of pervasive feature of the London commute especially.
54:41 Alie Ward? We have a whole episode about coffee, and yes, we delve into coffee breath in it. And it turns out... It's not so much the coffee itself, but it's the things that you are splashing into the coffee, like creamers and milks and sugars. And by you, I mean me. And by splashing, I mean pouring liberally. And those are what make your mouth a mid-morning stink bog. But that whole episode is stellar. We're going to link it in the show notes for you. Now, what about lunch, though?
55:06 Speaker 02 And then the other question was about racism and ethnic cuisines. We actually talk about this a fair amount, I think, in public discourse, the idea that people will go to school or to their workplace and they'll bring with them a lunch that is specific to their culture, you know, the food that they grew up eating, which is really comforting to them. And other people will kind of turn their nose up and make them feel bad about eating it. And we've seen actually bans on this kind of thing in public libraries, you know, where you'll say, like, don't bring in smelly foods.
55:49 Speaker 02 And sometimes they'll specify what kind of smelly foods they mean. And they'll say things like, you know, samosas. And you think, well, you know, fish and chips are really smelly as well, but you're not isolating that as a thing that you're not allowed to bring into this public space. So that clearly has some kind of racial component to it. I think we should take it seriously, actually. It's worth having those conversations, I think.
56:14 Alie Ward? OK, so remember her controversial viral tweet. One of the top replies read, "When I was in elementary school, the kids used to make fun of us brown kids by saying, 'You all smell like curry.' And many of us hated it when our parents would send us Indian food for lunch because of that. So what this academic is studying," the tweet said about Ali, "is a real thing and should not be ridiculed by the uneducated masses of Twitter." And that tweet was left by Dr. Khalil Andani, who is a Harvard professor of religion. Also, for those of South Asian descent, you may be in possession of the ABCC11 gene, which means that you have fewer active apocrine sweat glands in your pits and in your groin, which means that stink-making bacteria are not thriving in there,
56:59 Alie Ward? which means you have won the BO lottery. Now, for the rest of us, and I'll talk to my people, the stinky whites, I consulted Many message boards and apparently our sit down air, especially Americans, are widely agreed to smell like wet dogs or old milk or cold hot dogs or dirty pennies. Now, part of that might be diet related and as a person who lives within walking distance of three hot dog and four hamburger shops, I can vouch for a cultural predisposition.
57:30 Alie Ward? It's interesting how smell instantly jumps to association and it can be revealing of what people's association is. And then, once they've experienced it, their last association is that, oh, that was pretty good, you know?
57:44 Speaker 06 Spectacular. Give me 14 of them right now. Really? Do you know what's in here? I don't care. Don't tell me.
57:49 Alie Ward? So much of that is just tied to ignorance or lack of exposure or xenophobia. And going back in the past a little bit, he mentioned commutes, which made me want to ask this, but Melissa Hall asked, did everyone in the past smell like cigarettes all the time? They say, I love old Hollywood movies and everyone is always smoking inside in fancy places. And Melissa says, I'm a smoker and I feel like now cigarette smoke is associated with the lower classes and I'm super careful not to smell like my beloved cancer sticks. But what about the 50s? And Abigail Riggle also says, is there a scientific explanation behind why fresh and stale smoke smells so different?
58:28 Alie Ward? Has there been a change in how cigarette smoke has been portrayed in literature as kind of a tell for someone's class or habits?
58:39 Speaker 02 Oh, that's, okay. Well, A, I wasn't alive then. So I can't tell you from experience, but I can say that it's fairly safe to assume that probably, yes, it was more common for people to smell like smoke. But we also very easily habituate to smells that were around a lot. It doesn't take very long at all, really only about thirty seconds for us to habituate to a smell, like even the worst kind of smells, you know, like a pigsty or whatever. So long as the smell isn't shifting and changing or coming and going, we just stop noticing a smell, basically. So if you're in a room where people are smoking, you will pretty much just get used to it after not very long. My colleague Will Tullet has done some really
59:24 Speaker 02 interesting work on cafes and salons and smoking and has traced when smoking became a kind of more communal experience, why the fact that genders mixing in these public spaces meant that smoking became less popular because women who weren't used to the smell would complain about it. There's a great deal of work on stigmatization and smoking as it relates to smell and how people who smoke are very often represented as being foul smelling and disgusting and they have decaying teeth and yellow fingers and that kind of thing. And then it certainly does in some ways lead to a kind of moral stigmatization
1:00:08 Speaker 02 of something that is in most cases not moral. There is a kind of argument to be made for it affecting other people because it's a kind of a behaviour that's associated with poor health. As we were saying before, smell is deeply, deeply emotionally associative. And so if you have positive emotional associations with smoking, which you you very well might if you had, say, a grandparent that smoked or a parent that smoked, then it can be, you know, a very comforting thing to smell. I was thinking about The Parent Trap, both the book and the film, at the end where I think it's Hallie like hugs her grandfather and says that she's making a memory.
1:00:48 Alie Ward? Yes, I remember that.
1:00:50 Speaker 02 Every time I think about my grandfather.
1:00:56 Speaker 07 Tobacco peppermint.
1:00:57 Speaker 08 Smell of tobacco and peppermint. Well, I'll tell you, I use the peppermint for my indigestion and the tobacco to make your grandmother mad.
1:01:08 Speaker 02 I'll remember that he smelled like pipe tobacco and peppermint. I think there's a distinction between tobacco and cigarettes. And then there's also, of course, online, this kind of big discussion always being had about the difference between cigarette smoke and weed smoke.
1:01:25 Alie Ward? Yeah, it's interesting because I'm, I live in California where cannabis has been legal for a while now, essentially, and it more recently has become legal in New York. And so when I'm walking around in New York, the first couple of times I went to New York when it was legal, I thought, it smells like home right now. Like, it smells like California right now. And then I was like, oh, that's just weed. And now I've become habituated to it. You know, I smell it in New York and it doesn't raise any flags of like, oh, just because you're in some parts of the country, you're used to people smoking it wherever. But it's, yeah, it's funny that I would get homesick.
1:02:02 Alie Ward? If you're like, I wish there was a book that mentioned the smell of drugs, head on over to, say, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which sprinkles in a little hash smoke and the smell of huffing ether through a drenched Kleenex and then stumbling through Circus Circus. Or get a hit of Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, which contains gorgeously thick prose like, "At the moment, she was lying in an unlit room of uncertain size, which smelled of pot smoke and patchouli oil. And they moseyed south down the alleys of Gordita Beach in the slow seep of dawn and the wintertime smell of crude oil and salt water." Also, there's a description in Inherent Vice that is so striking,
1:02:45 Alie Ward? it just might as well be a teleportation device made of words. And it reads, "There were black light suites with fluorescent rock and roll posters and mirrored ceilings and vibrating waterbeds. Strobe lights blinked, incense cones sent ribbons of musk-scented smoke, ceiling word."
1:03:03 Alie Ward? And carpeting of artificial angora shag in various tones, including ox blood and teal, not always limited to floor surfaces, beckoned alluringly. I feel like you know exactly what that motel room smells like as soon as you turn the key, which brings us back to patron Abigail Riggles' question. Is there a scientific explanation behind why fresh and stale smoke smell so different? The answer is yes. Science calls this third-hand smoke, and it's made of the mix of nicotine, formaldehyde, and naphthalene that settles on surfaces into fibers and builds up over time. So the Mayo Clinic cautions that you can't get rid of third-hand smoke with more airflow. So fans, open windows, not going to help you. And it's hard to clean off third-hand smoke with typical household cleaning.
1:03:48 Alie Ward? So please, science, tell us how. Well, a 2020 paper titled "Remediating Third-Hand Smoke Pollution in Multi-Unit Housing: Temporary Reductions and the Challenges of Persistent Reservoirs" said that using a combination of dry and wet methods is most effective. So dry cleaning involved simple green all-purpose cleaner, followed by some distilled white vinegar, left on surfaces for a few minutes. But then wet cleaning was a bigger job with like professional steam cleaning teams and enzymatic preparations, attention paid to pH and all that. So this is why the fine print says that if you smoke in your rental Kia, they can hunt you down, they can hit you in the face, and they can take your wallet.
1:04:32 Alie Ward? And hotels? Don't even think about it unless you're a newly divorced guy whose wife found your WhatsApp and you're forced to stay at a weekly rate hotel for a while. Third-hand smoke is your new girlfriend.
1:04:44 Alie Ward? Last listener, or almost last listener question. Cool next door, first time question asker, Manna, and Scott Hanley wanted to know a little bit more about perfumes. Cool next door said this is fascinatingly exciting and hadn't heard about this before, but they're so curious. And Manna says, oh my God, this is heaven for a scent nerd. I'd love for Dr. Luke's to dive into her opinion on the way people interact with perfumes and overconsumption. And on that note, we had a couple of teachers. Thoroposaurus Jess said, as a high school teacher, I am subjected to many smells on a regular basis. They see firsthand how much scent is deeply important to students, like a 45 second
1:05:25 Alie Ward? continuous stream of Axe Body Spray or 57 consecutive scorts of Vanilla Bubble Gum Lilac Princess Peach Perfume and Bed Bath and Body Works stuff. Yeah, so perfume, like, when did that become such a part of our identity?
1:05:41 Speaker 02 Hmm. Well, I mean, affordable perfumes are still a relatively recent invention. Not so much as an invention, but I suppose a commodity that is actually available to the kind of average consumer. Now, I could be wrong about this, but the 1980s were really the time when a lot of kind of ordinary, middle-class people decided to buy fragrances to use. So obviously, women have always worked. They've always performed labor in various ways. But the 1980s saw women going into professions and jobs that they hadn't been able to before.
1:06:26 Speaker 02 And there were certain perfumes that were very much kind of marketed towards those particular groups, these kind of new professional women, at relatively affordable prices.
1:06:38 Alie Ward? So with the rise of synthetic ingredients, the normies had more access to smelling like flowers by the late 1800s. But perfume really started to permeate the air of the late 1970s and the early 80s, explains this essay Fragrance as Class Performance: Scent Signifiers Across Socioeconomic Boundaries. And in 1973, cosmetic companies like Revlon dared to show sassy, working women, wearing pants, smelling hot, and controlling their own destinies.
1:07:08 Speaker 02 So I'm thinking of like Reeve Guoche and Charlie. And they kind of became almost synonymous with that new style of femininity, which was like, take me seriously, but also I still want to smell like a woman.
1:07:27 Speaker 09 There's only one fragrance to wear when you're living in the fast lane, and that's Charlie.
1:07:32 Speaker 02 And so you got, those kind of fragrances were pretty overpowering in general. They're still pretty much on the market, but they've all been reformulated since their initial conception. But if you smell kind of the original decans, they're, they're quite strong. As with everything, you know, in fashion, music, smells and our smell preferences change over time. And so we now don't have quite so many floral notes in the average perfume than we would back then. We're now kind of in the era of the Gourmand in general.
1:08:04 Alie Ward? By Gourmand perfumes, I thought she just meant fancy, but it apparently means like edible smelling, like chocolate or honey or caramelly scents. A lot of sugar vibes, even some coffee notes and fruit. Now, Tom Ford makes a lost cherry fragrance with notes of almond and tonka bean. And yes, black cherry. It sells over $200 a bottle. And those in the know report that it happens to smell exactly like embalming fluid. Okay.
1:08:35 Alie Ward? Scott Hanley asks, top fragrances fetch high prices and are not available to lower income noses, like think Creed, et cetera. If that isn't a cultural disparity, I don't know one. But do you find that certain perfumes are described in novels to note, like this person has a lot of money and is old money and maybe this person not so much? I know that that quote too with Marilyn Monroe, like, what do I sleep in?
1:08:59 Speaker 10 What do you wear to bed? You wear a pajama top, the bottoms of the pajamas are a nightgown. So I say Chanel number five. Cause it's, it's the truth.
1:09:13 Speaker 10 And yet I don't want to say nude, but it's, it's the truth.
1:09:17 Alie Ward? Chanel number five.
1:09:18 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely.
1:09:21 Alie Ward? But yeah, do you ever find that types of perfumes are like, oh, this person is rich or like this person's new rich or something?
1:09:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, the thing that is interesting, I think, about fiction is that it's quite rare to come across references to specific fragrances, but there are examples. I mean, Toni Morrison in her novel Tar Baby references Chloé, like the brand Chloé, and that very, very famous original perfume.
1:09:50 Alie Ward? So Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, and Tar Baby is her 1981 novel about a black fashion model named Jadeen, who lives in a house with a wealthy white family. And they go to the Caribbean and she falls in love with someone named Sun, a black man who is on the run after a murder. So the novel follows how they balance their identities apart and together amid their surroundings. And in an interview, Morrison said of its title Tar Baby, that it's also a name that white people call black children, black girls, as I recall, she says. And at one time, a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things. She says, it held
1:10:32 Alie Ward? together things like Moses's little boat and the pyramids. For me, she says, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together. Now, Ally mentioned that there's a reference in this book to the fragrance Chloé, and I found the passage, which reads, "Usually when Margaret, the white daughter, overslept, Jade woke her up with a smile, some funny piece of mail or an exciting advertisement. And they would begin the day with some high spirited girlish nonsense. Look, Chloé has four new perfumes, four." So Chloé, it's this classic, high end, luxury perfume by Lagerfeld, and it came on the market in 1975, so right before the book came out. It's in a short ribbed
1:11:13 Alie Ward? square bottle with this crisp ballet pink bow at the nozzle, and it smells rosy and floral. So that tracks for the characters. But the only other mention of Chloé in Tar Baby is the very first page, which is a biblical quote from Corinthians 1:11. Which reads, "For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you." And this is just a post note on this aside from a few days after the episode went up. I thought I really ate with this aside, but what I completely forgot is that Toni Morrison's given name was Chloe, but some of her classmates had trouble pronouncing it. So she changed it to Toni because Anthony was her baptized Catholic name.
1:11:57 Alie Ward? So a couple Chloe Easter eggs in there, so befitting. Also, Ally absolutely already knew this and mentioned that this is included in her dissertation, which we're going to have to wait until her book comes out to get the details and her thoughts on that. But yeah, Chloe, great little perfume Easter egg, Toni.
1:12:13 Speaker 02 What I would say about perfume and exclusivity and classism is that obviously these kind of luxury brands are making you pay much more than you need to. But there are alternatives, there are affordable alternatives. And there are so many more brands who are doing things affordably now. You know, you can buy a sample for like one or two pounds and it will last you a week's worth of wear. And I think that's special.
1:12:46 Alie Ward? Oh, that's actually a good note. Last listener question is Megan Reeser wanted to know, they said, this is so exciting. I'm wondering right off the bat, what your favorite smells are. Wanted to know if you've had any sense that you previously hated, but you changed your mind about once you learned more about it and learned more context. Do you have something that through your work, you've suddenly smell lilac differently or suddenly smell jasmine differently?
1:13:09 Speaker 02 That's so interesting. Okay. Were you going to say something else?
1:13:15 Alie Ward? I was just going to buy you some time, but I was going to say there's a David Lynch recently passed away and he's buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery. And he was such a champion for LA and filmmaking. And the only thing on his tombstone, his epitaph just says, "Night blooming jasmine." And that's it. And it's, and it's so interesting because. Makes me want to tear up just saying that because there's certain times of the year that the night blooming jasmine, and it happens this time of year, is so pervasive in the city and it's so nostalgic and it's such a fingerprint of LA. If you've walked around the hills or if you've walked around parks at night. And I just thought it was so interesting that his last words were just night blooming jasmine because it says everything
1:13:59 Alie Ward? in three words about LA and about nighttime in LA. Anyway.
1:14:03 Speaker 02 Oh, that's so special. I'm so glad that you shared that. And it's, I will get around to answering the question, but it reminded me of this extremely recent experience that I had where one of my students submitted to me without letting me know that they were working on this, which made it even more wonderful, an essay about a short story by Julian Barnes called Pulse, which is about a man who loses his sense of smell at the same time that his wife is diagnosed with motor neuron disease. And so the story is kind of trying to think through these very, very different kinds of disability. And
1:14:46 Speaker 02 towards the end of the story, there's this really, really special scene where his wife is kind of lying in a hospital bed and she can't really move anymore and she can't really use many of her senses, but her sense of smell is still working and so is her hearing. And so he kind of talks about walks that they've been on and crushes herbs between his fingers so that she can imagine. He doesn't even really know if she's still kind of cognizant of this, but he does it anyway because he knows that it will be a way of kind of connecting her to better times.
1:15:22 Alie Ward? Oh, that's so beautiful.
1:15:24 Speaker 02 And I just thought it was an amazing story and I hadn't come across it before despite the fact that I work on smell disorders. So it was a really kind of remarkable thing that my student had just kind of submitted this. This essay offhand was like Hugo. Uh but um yeah, okay. So favourite smells, my two favourite smells are vanilla and fresh garden sage. Not the kind that you like, you know, like the dried stuff that you burn to like get rid of spirits.
1:15:55 Alie Ward? Mm hmm.
1:15:55 Speaker 02 But like the the kind of herb that you would use with like potatoes. We have a big sage bush in our garden and every time I go out there, I I pick a leaf and I just walk around with it. Because I think it's like one of the best smells ever. I have come to think about smell very differently and I've come to think about my kind of responsibility for how I react to smells very differently. So as a kind of young person, before I lost my sense of smell to Covid for eighteen months.
1:16:26 Alie Ward? Oh my god, what?
1:16:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:16:29 Alie Ward? No.
1:16:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:16:31 Alie Ward? Oh my god.
1:16:33 Speaker 02 I will explain this whole, yeah, okay. It wasn't my villain origin origin story because I was already working on smell when it happened, which made it, you know, all the more ironic.
1:16:41 Alie Ward? Oh my god.
1:16:43 Speaker 02 But as a young person, I was very perturbed by smells. I think I had quite a sensitive sense of smell and would often kind of be affected by smells that other people either couldn't smell or just were in kind of such small quantities that it didn't bother them. I felt very kind of overwhelmed by smell very often. So sitting on the bus next to a smelly person, you know, wearing like a a coat that had been out in the rain and then dried, that would make me feel a bit like, uh, I need to get out of here. Um, and I do think that doing my work has made me think quite seriously about those situations and like how I interact with people who might smell different or strongly.
1:17:25 Speaker 02 But my my relationship with most smells has changed since losing my sense of smell. Because I kind of experienced the whole panoply of smell disorders on my road to recovery. And it's still not quite there. I think it's probably about seventy five percent of what it used to be. Which in some ways is quite helpful because it's less annoying.
1:17:45 Alie Ward? I was gonna say, yeah, like you would you'd had it dialed up to like one fifty.
1:17:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:17:50 Alie Ward? Like maybe it's just at a hundred now. Maybe you're just on the level with right everyone else. But did your sense of smell gradually come back?
1:17:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it was gone, like gone completely, 100% couldn't smell a thing for 18 months. And then it very, very slowly, like so incrementally that it was practically impossible to know that I was recovering. Yeah, it has slowly, slowly come back, but a lot of things smell different to how they used to.
1:18:19 Alie Ward? So Ally points to her desk, which has little bottles of perfume and other smell samples. And she told me that she's still having to retrain her nose and identify certain notes. And this is the most literary thing I can imagine happening to her. Like, how, how is she not in a corset with the local stable boy, taking her around a flower garden in spring to teach her the smell of daffodils to rehabilitate her nose?
1:18:46 Speaker 02 I used to be really good at it. I used to be able to smell something and know what was in there. And now everything smells different. It's like having a kind of hard reset.
1:18:56 Alie Ward? Wow.
1:18:57 Speaker 02 You have to kind of work, I suppose, I mean, it's a, this is a, maybe a terrible comparison, but it's kind of like learning to walk again, you know, like everything is different. You're having to build up your understanding from the ground up.
1:19:11 Alie Ward? Yeah, and it's so elemental to your field, too. That is so specific. Is that, I was gonna ask what one of the worst things about your work was. I imagine having to retrain your nose as someone who writes about olfactory. Yeah, like what's, what's one of the hardest things?
1:19:28 Speaker 02 I mean, I actually genuinely think that maybe the hardest part of my work, because I love what I do. I really genuinely can say that I love what I do. The hardest thing is returning to books that are really great examples of olfactory texts in that, you know, smell is very fundamental to them. And it's operating in a way that is, you know, necessary for the functioning of the plot or for characterization or style or whatever. But the books themselves are just absolutely hideous.
1:20:05 Alie Ward? Just like poorly written?
1:20:06 Speaker 02 I mean that they include representations of just like really horrific things, you know? Lolita is is one thing, that's a very, it's a special text in the sense that it really, the kind of linguistic glossing effect that goes on means that a lot of the horror is very subdued. But some texts will just throw the horror at you and ask you to deal with it. But during the PhD, I did not very often get to work on positive smells of any description or like family-friendly, fun, nice books.
1:20:48 Speaker 02 It was always people doing horrible things to each other in the realm of fiction.
1:20:54 Alie Ward? That's gotta be not easy to shake off. Do you have to then go to like a comfort read? Right after that, just go crack into whatever comfort read you've got?
1:21:03 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah, I really do. And I really try to resist any kind of snobbery about fiction. Like, I will happily read young adult fiction. When I was finalizing the edits on my thesis, I listened to all of the audiobooks for A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is a series that I loved when I was a kid. Again, and it actually really rewards a reread because it's very intensely literary. There are lots and lots of references to canonical literature in those books. So I really enjoyed that. It was a way of like completely shutting my brain off at nighttime.
1:21:40 Alie Ward? What about you? You mentioned you love what you do. What's your favorite thing about the job, about being in this field?
1:21:45 Speaker 02 I love feeling like I really genuinely have a sense of purpose, that I I know that whatever I choose to do is contributing new knowledge. I think that's the really special thing that I love about smell studies is that because it really hasn't been going for very long, you know, it kind of emerged in the 1980s. There's so much work to do and it all feels very invigorating and necessary. And I love feeling like I'm making a contribution in some way.
1:22:16 Alie Ward? It's interesting to think of how many people.
1:22:19 Alie Ward? Who are now familiar with your work might incorporate smell differently in their own writing, whether it's screenwriting, or poetry, or prose.
1:22:27 Speaker 02 I think it's incredibly special, actually, that people choose to send me messages all the time on social media about how they have come to think about some aspect of their olfactory life differently. And I love hearing from people. I think almost everyone has a sense of smell.
1:22:47 Alie Ward? Sorry to my friend Mica, who does not.
1:22:49 Speaker 02 And I love hearing about them. I love it when people share. It's, again, it's stories. I'm just, I'm addicted to stories. I always have been. And I love when people tell me any kind of story.
1:23:02 Alie Ward? So ask literary people literally the stupidest questions, because what is life without stories? Thank you so, so much to Dr. Ali Lukes for the chat. And you can follow her on Instagram at Dr. Ali Lukes, and Ali Lukes on Blue Sky. You can stay tuned for her two upcoming books, which I will be celebrating. I'm gonna climb to the top of a hill and just scream, "Yah!" Now, a donation, again, was made to the UN Crisis Relief, specifically the Occupied Palestinian Territory Humanitarian Fund. Again, highly encouraged to listen to our very unfunny episode on genocide with Dr. Dirk Moses. More links to studies will be up at aliwar.com/literaryolfactology. You can find a whole catalog of
1:23:43 Alie Ward? our 400-plus episodes just by going to ologies.com. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. You can join Patreon at patreon.com/ologies to support the show and leave questions for the ologists before we record. Erin Talbert admin Seologies Podcast Facebook group. Avaleen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Callie Ardwire does the website. The long-lasting Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Happy birthday to my sister Saucer today, who I adore. Get well to our editor Jake Chaffee, who is out with a minor plague. Susan Hale is Chanel number one, who managing directs this whole situation. Lead editor is the crisp and elegant Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, and robustly musky Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media, and also my marriage stepped in to co-edit this episode, as we have ordered
1:24:28 Alie Ward? Jake back to bed. Nick Thorb- Made the theme music and if you stick around to the end of the episode, I burden you with a secret from my life. And this one is courtesy 2009 me when I had a date with this crush who wanted to cook me dinner. And he asked me if I was like allergic to any foods or if I didn't like anything. And I told him I didn't really like garlic or onions. And this was a lie, but I did hope to make out with him, which is why I said I didn't like him. But he didn't know that and he didn't know how to make a meal like flavorful in their absence. So he very sweetly chopped up like a bunch of parsley and rosemary and herbs, which was a nightmare.
1:25:10 Alie Ward? The entire time I just kept thinking I had green things in all my teeth. And I was like, this is my fault. I brought this on myself. Anyway, he was very kind, wonderful dude. In the end, we were not each other's people. And now me, your internet uncle is married to your pod mother, Jarrett, and he could smell like anything and I would not mind. I hope that's reciprocal. Okay. Go stick your face in a rose. Go waltz maybe through the perfume department at a fancy store. Don't buy anything. You smell things. Put a little vanilla extract on your wrists. That's free. It smells great. Maybe saute some onions for me. Oh, treat yourself to a chapter or two in one of those books out of your nightstand. I will do the same. Okay. Bye bye.
1:26:12 Speaker 08 I like the smell of your books.
1:26:19 Speaker 04 Oh, look. You just got added to a meeting about coordinating another meeting to prepare for the pre-meeting ahead of the follow-up meeting, which will, of course, require a recap meeting. And then another meeting. Hit your booking point. Book with Southwest and enter airplane mode.
1:26:46 Speaker 11 Insurance may all seem the same on the surface, but having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it when you wanted a three-layer birthday cake. You wouldn't settle for just any dessert on your birthday. So don't settle for just any insurance. When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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