The world hasn’t become less smelly — we’ve just lost our nasal knowledge

Air, land, and sea. Our world is characterized by a proliferating variety of uncertain scents. Yet our noses are ill-equipped to discern between them. Pollution, pandemics, and poverty have conspired to reduce our sensitivity. Some gases, such as the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide emitted by industries and waste sites, induce a selective loss of smell. These substances are most dangerous when they are least odorous.

When we try to use our noses, the result can be confusion. Supermarkets across the globe have begun to remove “best before” dates from products such as milk and yogurt in an attempt to avoid food waste. They have encouraged consumers to deploy the sniff test to distinguish the sweet, mild, scent of fresh milk from a sour spoiled odor. Sniffing was one of the main ways in which premodern people could discern the freshness of food; but thanks to the arrival of cellophane packaging and refrigeration, we have allowed our nasal knowledge to deteriorate. Many consumers still confuse the “best before” date, a measure of quality, with the “use by” date, a measure of safety, and end up endangering themselves by relying on the nose too much or wasting food by relying on it too little.

When it comes to the olfactory — the scientific term for all things smell-related — we are living in a land of confusion. One reason that we seldom rely on our sense of smell is that we value it so little. In response to a 2011 worldwide survey of 7,000 16- to 30-year-olds, over half said they would give up their sense of smell before handing over their technology. Ten years later, a survey of 407 college students and adults in the U.S. found that one-quarter of the college student respondents said that they would give up their sense of smell in order to keep their phone, and nearly half of all women would give up their sense of smell to keep their hair.

We also generally believe that humans are poor smellers. There are expert sniffers among the human population who describe the odors of wines, coffees, and perfumes. But we do not teach our children how to use their noses. Schools are places in which odors are feared as signs of hygiene poverty, where children learn that cleanliness is a civic duty, and where the young come to understand that those who smell different should be excluded.

As the world of smells expands and shape-shifts, we have become trapped in a vicious cycle in which olfactory illiteracy and a disinclination to deploy our noses mutually reinforce each other.

Yet there is hope. The last few years have seen a renewed interest in all things olfactory. The recent, anosmia-inducing COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of digital worlds that lack scent have made people aware of what it means to lose our sense of smell. Social media is alive with communities sharing their favorite fragrances. Museums and attractions are embracing scent as they attempt to engage audiences through all of their senses.

But the popular discussion of smell’s past is dominated by a narrative of decline and disappearance. Books on the science of smell have multiplied. But many of these contain statements that would make historians blush. One claims that “the stench of cities decreased in the nineteenth century.” The question of which cities and whose assessment of stench aside, this somewhat underestimates the impact of the flushing toilet, industrial expansion, and the massive growth of horse-bound transportation.

We are often told that the modern world is one that has devalued the sense of smell whilst deodorizing the world around us. I want to offer a different story. The past and the present are both rich in smells. In fact, over the course of the last few centuries, our world has been odorized in new and ever more opaque ways. We have not forgotten the sense of smell and the world has not necessarily become less odorous, but it has become less easily navigable by nose.

Understanding the smells of the past can help us escape our present disorientation and equip our noses for the planet’s challenging future. In the spring of 2022, I set out to discover what people in Britain thought of the smells around them and which scents from their lives they wanted to preserve for the future. Since the 1930s, Mass Observation has been dedicated to tracing the everyday experiences and attitudes of the British public, but they had never asked the public about smell. We challenged their participants, who had signed up to respond to the archive’s quarterly “directives,” to perform three tasks: to talk about the smell of a significant object in their home, to record a smell diary of an ordinary day, and to reflect on the smells that had meant something to them over the course of their lives. Many of the respondents struggled to describe an odorous object in their homes. People were puzzled by the smell diary, though certain patterns did emerge: the morning smell of shower gel and soaps, brewing coffee, and car-exhaust fumes were a recurring routine. Aged between 40 and 80 years old, the respondents felt that their noses had lost their former sensitivity. They apologized: “I’m not very good at describing smells;” “I don’t have a very sensitive nose.”

As the world of smells expands and shape-shifts, we have become trapped in a vicious cycle in which olfactory illiteracy and a disinclination to deploy our noses mutually reinforce each other.

But when our 130 or so writers were asked about the smells of their past, the responses were revelatory. These miniature essays were magical. As I read them, I was transported into a world that was not my own, yet somehow retained a whiff of the familiar. I would never know these people’s names, but the lovingly crafted descriptions made me feel close to them. To give you just a sniff at this potent prose, it is worth quoting a longer extract:

I no longer smell the array of smells I remember from my childhood. A coal fire, the smell of a sweet shop, woodsmoke from a garden, liniment rubbed into youthful limbs before a game of rugby league. Pipe tobacco drifting on the breeze (usually emanating from a man wearing a hat with a little feather in it).

Fireworks smelled differently back then, so did our Dads coming home grubby from a day’s graft, welding in a filthy shipyard. The smell from a can of 3 in 1 oil lubricating a bike chain in the shed, a paraffin lamp lighting the same shed. The smell of the candles on the mantelpiece when the lights went out due to the Miners strike in ‘74. I remember the smell of a library book when I got it home and opened its pages for the first time. The smell of my Grandad’s old News of the World when it was a Sunday broadsheet, it smelled so different from my Dad’s Observer, a different ink perhaps.

I challenge anybody to remain unmoved by this description. The sense of a past world, with all its minute textures, folds, and creases, is irresistibly palpable. Each time and place has been allocated a scratch-and-sniff label in a personal archive. Smellscapes — the collected smells of the environment in which the writer lived — can tell us a story not just of a single life, but of the world across centuries of change.

This article is featured on Big Think.