Nosy Interview: Saskia Wilson-Brown

Saskia in NGC 2170: Celestial Still Life, © Ignacio Diaz Bobillo

Saskia is the fearless founder of the awesomely innovative Institute for Art and Olfaction. If you're in the Los Angeles area, you should definitely check out their events and stop in for an open session. No matter where you are, I recommend nosing around (how could I resist?) the IAO website and liking their Facebook page (they post great links!), and not just because I'm proud to be have their support for my nosy research in Rwanda. You can find and follow Saskia (and the IAO) on Twitter, too. 

What do you smell like?  
Right now it's Sunday night, and I think I smell like a day well lived: Sun baked skin, myriad bits of displaced leaves and grass, steer manure (unfortunately hard to remove), a smidge of 'Jeux de Peau' by Serge Lutens, and, inevitably, coffee and cigarettes. Every perfume I buy has to compete with a base of cigarette smoke. It's a unique challenge, but I like to tell myself it makes my life a little more Brigitte Bardot. 

So let's just say I smell like Brigitte Bardot (minus the steer manure: I sincerely doubt she gardened).

What do you like to smell? 
Other than the obvious pleasant smells like flowers and frying onions and such, some smells I've always loved are: Los Angeles after it rains (steaming cement, basically: strangely earthy), sandalwood, grapefruits, tacos, an art studio (oil paints make me nostalgic), chlorine, an empty ski run in freezing weather (solitude!), cigarette smoke after an especially long meeting, jet fuel, the nape of my husband's neck... 

What I always enjoy spending nose-time on is an unfolding idea. I've never had a hyper-developed nose like so many folks who are into scent. For me it's been an extremely strange process of learning how to identify and put words onto what I'm smelling. But the concepts behind the scents are what really get me. When someone is using scent as an art medium, and can use elements in a symbolic way-- when a perfume becomes an illustration of a concept or a story. So I guess I love the smell of a good story.

smell in school

 Barbery-Coulon & her bookshelf of bottles via Into the Gloss 

Into the Gloss's Top Shelf interview series is a treat for nosy folks like me, who like to peek into people's medicine cabinets (and kitchen cupboards and bedroom closets--invite me over!). In the latest installment, Lili Barbery-Coulon talks a lot about fragrance, perfumers, and smell. An excerpt: 

I love opening the bottles and just smelling them, and I make my daughter smell them too, because it’s very important to get trained because we’re not used to using our nose anymore. It used to be one of the most efficient senses of all the senses. It used to enable you to be able to say, ‘Is this food going to make me sick?’ Or, ‘Is there danger somewhere?’ Or, ‘Am I attracted to this person?’ You would be driven by your nose all the time. And now, we’ve shot our connections to fragrances, to skin—like, skin has to smell fresh and clean all the time. We’re covered with products that don’t let us smell the original skin, like, no odor—our fragrance, our scent. I think it’s very important that we all train ourselves to smell because it makes you feel better when you have food. For my kid, I mean, I think parfum should be taught in school. It would be so great, to be able to read, to smell, you know? To read, smell, write—just part of everything. But of course, it’s not something that people think is important. I try to let her smell.

What would it be like to learn to smell in school? I hardly remember talking about smell in the classroom at all, except in the context of lessons about the five senses (in fifth grade, we ate an apple and a potato with our eyes blindfolded and our noses clothespinned), or when we would receive a scratch n' sniff sticker with certain hot lunches (a dill pickle sticker is nearly reason enough to endure 'barf on a rock' and other school lunch specialties). If you have children, how do you teach them to smell? About smell?

olfactory flashcards

flashcards via

Even though I love talking about the way things smell, I don't have a very sophisticated vocabulary for doing so. I would like to be better able to identify not just notes in perfumes, but things I smell throughout the day. Studying with olfactory flashcards would be so much fun: carrot, celery, coriander, cucumber, cumin. I'd like cards with all the weird flavors from those labs in New Jersey, too: hamburger, bubblegum, banana malted milkshake.

 olfactionary photo by nathan branch

The closest available thing to a flashcard set might be Le Labo's Olfactionary or Mandy Aftel's Oil Kit. Le Labo's goal with the Olfactionary's "is to help you 'open your nostrils' in the same way good books open the readers' eyes to life. Philosophers speak about 'men with stitched-up eyelids' when referring to people who are blind to the basics of existence. Most of us live with stitched-up nostrils, having grown up in a world where smells are hidden away, and our olfactory senses are left to wither." I don't know that we willfully let our olfactory senses wither, but most of us don't spend a lot of time training them. I would love to set up my own little lab full of these tiny bottles, a makeshift perfumer's organ on our rickety old sewing table.