nosy about

Above is a list of how some Google-users recently wound up visiting Nosy Girl.  Welcome, fellow fans of Josh Charles' nose! It is I, your captain, Manure Girl, unsure how to vor-mag water, but very curious myself about that last string of search terms. Was the searcher concerned about her brother picking his friend's nose, or was she hoping to find video footage of such an activity?

Nosy Interview: Roisin Meaney

Roisin in the Hidden Treasures of M78, © ESO & Igor Chekalin

Roisin and I met at La Muse Writers' and Artists' Retreat, where certain magical 12th-century smells still linger in the stone walls. A bestselling author in Ireland, Roisin recently celebrated the U.S. publication of her novel Semi-Sweet. To learn more about Roisin and her work, please visit her website, or connect with her on Facebook.

What do you smell like?
I think it depends on the time of day. First thing in the morning I probably smell lavender-ish, because I douse my sheets and pillows in a lavender spray every evening to help me sleep. (It's not all that effective, but I love the smell.) After my shower I smell like a grapefruit; I'm partial to the scent of citrus in the morning, so I tend to hunt down lemony/mandariny/grapefruity shower gels, and right now it's grapefruit.
 
After a walk I imagine I smell like the street - carbon monoxide with a dash of fast food - or the rain if I've been caught in it (damply woolly, or wetly cottony). After a session of baking (which happens quite often) I hope I smell of vanilla, or coconut, or almonds, or something equally tasty. In September, when I bake my Christmas cakes (about a dozen, for various households) I smell permanently of dark rum, mixed spice and oranges. After my weekly bums, tums and thighs class I smell rubbery, because I use my yoga mat for the floor work.
 
When I'm going out I smell of whatever perfume is on my dressing table. At the moment it's Chanel No 5. I use the body oil and the perfume, because I feel just one layer of scent doesn't last on my skin. I rarely buy the same fragrance twice in a row, because by the time I get to the end of the bottle I'm usually sick of it, but some of the scents I revisit every so often would be Jo Malone's Grapefruit, L'Occitaine's Jasmine and Vivienne Westwood's Boudoir.
 
Going to bed I smell of toothpaste and night cream, which has a talcum-y, floral scent. And overlaying every other smell is probably essence of cat, because I love to cuddle my two!
 
What do you like to smell?
Seaweed, jasmine, peat briquettes, frying onions, melting cheese, vinegary French fries, sweet pea, my six-month old nephew's belly, milk chocolate, country air after the rain, old books, new books, fat felt tip pens, barbecuing meat, just-picked strawberries, and freshly-brewed coffee (but oddly, I rarely drink coffee.) I also love the smell of the sea and just-mown lawns and flower shops. Oh, and wood smoke. And forests. And cotton that's been hung out to dry.

spring ring

The lilies of the valley are making their intentions known. Some magnificent human planted half of the whole front yard of our building with lilies of the valley, and while the white skirts haven't opened yet, the smell is already incredible. Did you know that it's nearly impossible to extract essential oil from lilies of the valley? All the perfumery devoted to the muguet, as it's also known, is the work of chemists trying to capture that perfect little bell of a note. 

All the brick in Boston makes me think it's a city made for the fall (the 46,000 universities here support my view), but it does pretty well for itself in spring, too. 

real red! no filters or funny business.

glitter confetti gutter

Nosy Interview: Maria Parrott-Ryan

  Maria and her fish friend somehow manage to breathe in the Monsters of IC 1396, © Geert Barensten & Jorick Vink 

Maria and I met during a study abroad semester in London, and have gone on to smell one another in more time zones than most married couples. Things occur to her from time to time at The Mepper.

 

What do you smell like?

It depends on the season. In the cold months my skin gets really dry, so I probably smell like whatever lotion I'm slathering on at all hours of the day. I don't like to buy the really heavily-scented ones, so my smell is (god I hope) pleasant, but subdued. Really, I think the primary ingredient of most lotions I use is water, so maybe I smell like water, which I maintain (and yes, I have had arguments about this) doesn't actually have a smell at all, but takes on the smell of many other things, like salt or chlorine or rusty pipes or musty wells or duck butt. 

When it's hot I still wear lotion, but the heat usually manages to render it powerless against my own natural body smells. The result is what I imagine one would smell like after receiving a gentle, full-body pat-down by a large man working one of the cheese curd stalls at the Madison Farmer's Market on a hot, humid day—a cheesy-palm-sweat smell, if you will.

What do you like to smell?

I love to cook risotto mostly for the moment after you dump the cup of white wine over the oil, onions, garlic, and rice that are simmering away. The great thing about risotto is that you have to stir pretty frequently, so you have a good excuse to stand over the pot and just inhale the warm, boozy smell for a while.

I love any rare smell that can take me back to a specific place. I like to smell that whiff of manure I get when driving past the farms on the way to my parent's place in Iowa. The smell of film developing fluid takes me to the back room of the newspaper office in my tiny Iowa hometown. My grandpa was the editor-in-chief, and my dad worked there, too. Sometimes I would visit them both at work, and I'd hang out drinking bottles of Cokes in the break room, which was right next to the dark room. That smell permeated the place so much that the Coke tasted like it was laced with developer. I felt pretty good at those moments, being allowed to hang out with the adults while they did their adult things. That's a smell I'll probably only smell a couple more times in my life, if at all, now that dark rooms are on the way out. Maybe I should see if Kodak is trying to unload any old bottles of film--I'd hoard them in my basement and occasionally pop open a bottle for a quick sniff, just to make sure I don't forget about the back room of the newspaper office.

By far my favorite smell is autumn, which luckily I get to smell every year in the Midwest. Those rotting leaves do something to me. That smell always makes me think something is about to happen. If I were to ever find a secret door to a magical realm, I would almost certainly find it in autumn. If by some cosmic mistake I happened upon one in summer or winter, you know what? I don't know if I'd walk through.

magical manure

I'd always assumed that the difference between beautiful (really!) and noxious manure smells was entirely a matter of what the cows ate. But my dad sent me an article this weekend that suggested it's a bit more complicated than that (as matters of poop so often are). If you're not inclined to read a four-page academic report on odor management as it relates to animal waste, let me at least share some highlights:

No single compound has been identified as a good predictor of odor sensation across situations in the field. Because of this, human panelists conduct odor measurements and quantify odor intensity and unpleasantness.

Manure sniffer-and-ranker! My future author-bio could put all those bricklaying, fish-gutting, sex-working writers to shame.

And this:

Based on psychological tests, seven primary classes of olfactory stimulants have been found to preferentially excite separate olfactory cells. These classes are: 1) ethereal, 2) camphoraceous, 3) musky, 4) floral, 5) minty, 6) pungent, and 7) putrid. 

Ethereal in this case refers to Ethylene Dichloride (which the EPA says has a "pleasant chloroform-like odor"), but it's more magical to think of it as that heavenly part of the cow poop. Dirt to dirt and all of that.

jay'z nose

"But now I'm so fresh you could smell me through a ziplock." Jay-Z's verse in Pharrell's "Drop it Like It's Hot"

sweat taxonomy

Peter's mention of airplane-specific sweat, along with Katie's description of the "clean sweat" smell of a dancer, made me think about the different types of sweat we become familiar with on our own bodies, and on the bodies of our loved ones.

"Ripe" is such a great word for describing sweatiness somewhat affectionately. Ripe goes both ways--repellent and sexy. Ripe is past fresh but not rotten. Pluckable.

I'm married to a graduate student who is in the throes of final papers, and I swear there is a specific "study sweat" that is different from any of the other sweats of his I know. There is something in the library books, then, that seeps into his fingertips as he's reading, noodles with his glands, and teaches everybody around him a thing or two.

Nosy Interview: Peter Mountford

 Peter and Anna nuzzle in front of Comet Hale-Bopp over Val Parola Pass, © A. Dimai

Peter and I met through Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers in the Schools program. His debut novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, was released in April, and if you're lucky you can still catch him on tour. For more on Mountford, please visit his website.

What do you smell like? 

There was a girl I dated for a while once, a long time ago, who used very pungent perfume, very trashy perfume. It was great. My clothes would all smell like I'd been at a brothel. It was a hoot for a while but unsupportable in the long run.

In high school, I worked as an ice cream scooper at Ben & Jerry's in DC and stank of sweet cream. That was six months of my life there. Ten years I didn't eat ice cream after that. 
 

Nowadays, when I take a long flight, I stink. Why is that? Like, at the end of a day at home, I don't stink, but if I spend twelve hours on an airplane, I need to put on some deodorant. What's up with that?
 

Otherwise, like, in general, I don't smell me, so I don't really know how I smell. I use the cheapest and plainest deodorant on the planet, just regular flavored speed stick. And, don't tell anyone, but I also spritz myself daily with a blast of fancy cologne. My wife, she doesn't ever complain.

What do you like to smell?

I have this baby who I used to like to smell. Her name is Anna and for a long time she smelled just great, like fresh milk and baby. No washing needed. Breath was pristine, too. Even her poo didn't smell that bad, just kind of like butter. It's hard to dislike someone who smells that good.
 

This was all, I've learned, part of nature's chicanery: it's just a ploy to trick parents into not ditching their babies, because the babies smell so damn good and have these big sweet eyes and then you think twice about chucking them into the river when they howl at night. 

That smell was incredible, though!  She got filthy and still smelled the same. That was great. Then she got a bit older and we started feeding her tiny cheeseburgers and buttered succotash and stuff and suddenly the poo became really horrible and her general smell was not far behind. We wash her all the time now, but at best she smells like a person who just got out of the shower. It's okay. Her breath is still good. And I still like her, but it's not the same.

recollected weekend smells

It was a super-fragrant weekend! Some highlights:

Elisa let me come over and sniff her impressive perfume collection. I was introduced to the number-one fragrance for off-duty cowboys, eau d'Haribo, and a whole bunch of beautiful perfumes to add to my already obscenely long wishlist.

(last spring in Seattle)

Violets were everywhere! I had to access deep reserves of self-control to not yank them up by the fistfuls and macerate them in my mouth. Here's Diane Ackerman on smelling violets:

Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet, I might offer, doing what we always do: defining one smell by another smell or another sense...The thing about violets, which many people find cloying to the point of nausea, is that no response to them lasts long; as Shakespeare put it, they're: Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting, /The perfume and suppliance of a minute

Violets contain ionone, which short-circuits our sense of smell. The flower continues to exude its fragrance, but we lose the ability to smell it. Wait a minute or two, and its smell will blare again. Then it will fade again, and so on.

The smell of popcorn is an all-time favorite, and I also have a great deal of fondness for the smell of a good hardware store. So imagine the devotion I feel for my local Tags/Ace hardware shop, where they occasionally roll out a popcorn machine and give you a little Ace-logo-emblazoned bag of popcorn just for wandering in off the street. 

(last summer at the hardware store)

I was at the hardware store to buy a 9" springform cake pan (this hardware store keeps getting better and better, no?) so I could try this almond cake recipe, recommended by my friend Rebecca, who makes the best pineapple upside down cake in the world. On Sunday afternoon, the whole house smelled like almond paste and spring breeze and library books.

Yesterday was May Day. Did you play ding-dong-ditch and leave a paper cone of tulips on a friend's porch? It's probably not too late.