The American Southwest smells unlike anywhere I’ve lived before. It’s better than the woods of Maine; it’s far more fragrant. I didn’t expect that when I moved here. I’m a perfume collector, so I had smelled the desert through art before I smelled it in person. Through my experience sampling “Mojave Ghost,” “Arizona,” and “Desert Eden”—perfumes designed to evoke cactus flowers and conifers—I thought the mesas would smell dusty and musky, with a little green cypress thrown in. I was wrong.
After a year in Santa Fe, I’ve finally started to scratch the surface of knowing this landscape. But the learning is slow and requires all my senses, including the one most often forgotten, what Hellen Keller called the “fallen angel” of the body. Unable to see or hear, smell became her primary way of reading the wider world; she lamented how that “most important” sense had been “neglected and disparaged” by the general populace, though she found it hard to communicate this knowledge to others. “It is difficult to put into words the thing itself,” she wrote. “There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.” (...)
I could list each note that sung with the pine, laying it out beat by beat. That’s how perfume companies do it: They give you the top, middle, and base notes. Sometimes this information is provided right on the packaging, though one still must sniff the nozzle to understand how they all come together. Language can only offer a loose approximation of a perfume, and a perfume can only offer a loose approximation of a natural smellscape.
The airy scent that follows rain is known as petrichor, and there are many forms. The petrichor in Singapore, for example, will be quite different from that of Reykjavik. The desert smells most intensely after a sudden summer downpour, when the plants release their oils, when the soil opens its pores to the sky. Nevertheless, perfumers have identified a common essence to petrichor: the chemical compound geosmin. It takes its name from the Greek words for “earth” and “smell.” In small amounts—and we are able to detect very small amounts of geosmin, down to 10 parts per trillion, akin to a stick of incense diffused through the entire Empire State Building—it smells familiar and musty, a little minerally, a little dirty, but in a nice way. In larger doses, it can come across mildewy and rank, like dirty laundry left in a damp basement. In nature, geosmin is produced by certain species of blue-green algae that live within soil, and is part of the fragrance bouquet that gets released into the air before, during, and after the high desert gets hit by rain.
For perfumers, the discovery and naming of geosmin in the 1960s was a boon, although it did take several more years to perfect the lab-synthesized version of the compound. It can be used in perfumery to add a muddy, petrichor scent to the bouquet. Since most fragrance houses don’t release a list of their chemical compounds, it’s not always easy to know when you’re smelling geosmin, but if you’re looking for a desert-inspired smellscape, there’s a good chance that synthetic petrichor will be part of the mix. (...)
But there are other ways to get a rainy desert scent, according to Cebastien Rose and Robin Moore, perfumers at the Albuquerque-based company Drylands Wilds. Unlike most perfumers, they don’t use synthetic odor molecules; their ingredients are derived from locally foraged plants, and through their work, they’ve become experts in the various scentscapes of New Mexico. Including greasewood, which is often considered a pest plant, a garbage scrub that needs getting rid of but is also responsible for an earthy, fresh Southwestern scent that wafts from its leaves. “Right before it rains,” explains Rose, “it opens all its stomata.” These “tiny mouths” are how the plant breathes, and as the rain begins to fall, the leaves release aromatic organic compounds called cresols, which smell a bit like coal tar and—thanks in part to their association with rainfall—a lot like a drenched desert.
“We’re obsessed with trying to capture that exact experience of being out here, walking the hills, smelling the piñon resin when it gets hot, smelling the ponderosa bark that wafts the air with vanilla,” Rose says. But it’s not enough to simply extract oils from the bark. It’s even difficult to capture a single tree in perfume form, says Rose. Plus, that wouldn’t reflect the experience of walking under the “giant, orange-barked trees. You wouldn’t get the oak moss, the soil, the place.” That, explains Rose, is where the “art of perfumery” comes in. The Dryland Wilds ponderosa perfume has yellow nutsedge, sweet clover, piñon, oakmoss, fir, and ponderosa. It contains extracts that mimic the dirt, resulting in a liquid that smells like a tree, yes, but is also intended to smell like a moment—a dry summer afternoon on the Atalaya trails, for instance. “We’ve had people cry after smelling it,” adds Moore. “One woman had lived in a ponderosa tree trying to protect old growth forest for a year, and for her, that hit was instantaneous.” (...)
Smell, as a sense, is dependent on so many variables—it can be affected by our previous experience, our current context, and our emotional or mental state. Something may smell “good” in one scenario and disgusting in another. How we judge a smell can be changed by the sounds we’re hearing, the temperature that surrounds us, the food we’re tasting, the colors we’re seeing. It’s a sense that shifts and slips, sometimes in predictable ways but sometimes in totally unexpected directions. (...)
Each smell is a distinct sensation, but together they are more than that. Smellscapes are part of place-making, the process by which a site becomes imbued with meaning and metaphor; a place is more than just the physical location. Places have history, lore, memory, and emotion all infused into them, and encounters we have with a place are participatory.
by Katy Kelleher, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Mike Hardiman/Shutterstock[ed. Greatly undervalued. Whenever I go back to Alaska I'm definitely aware of how unique the air smells - primal and earthy, sharp and fresh. Same with the lush tropical slopes high above Hawaii's beaches, early at sunrise. In terms of manufactured smells, a wisp of Eau de London or Hai Karate (!) (which I haven't experienced in decades) can take me back in an instant to my first girlfriend and high school... over 50 years ago. Powerful stuff.]
