"Man survived because nature endowed him with an unpleasant taste and unpleasant smell." This is the opinion of Dr. Louis Leaky, the famous anthropologist who discovered the earliest bones of Homo sapiens estimated to be 400 million years old in Africa. Leaky further suggested that because human flesh was not palatable and smelled unpleasant, cannibals only partook of it as part of a ritual. What greater insurance of survival is there than tasting and smelling bad?
While how people smelled in the past may have served some useful purpose, it has gotten some really bad press in modern times. Some insinuate that this is because labor is "lower class," and the smell of sweat suggests that a person has to do physical labor for a living. Probably, the identification of body smells with dirt, as well as social class distinctions, are involved in our reactions to such smells. For some peculiar reason, people in the United States seem anxious to suppress natural body smells. You can tell people they need a haircut or to wash their face, but if you tell them they smell, you have been insulting.
All fragrance companies have one goal in mind -- to convey a message that will sell their product. Big business thinks enough of how people smell that it spends well over a billion dollars a year reminding you of it. An overwhelming number of television commercials, every day, caution against the danger of leaving home without proper underarm protection or with bad breath. Why? Because advertisers are confident that your best friends won't tell you.
Sociologists report that a child between the age of two and six is exposed to at least 55 hours of television per week saturated with these commercials promoting cleanliness and hygienic products. If you could take away our fears of being close, of being unclean, of being unattractive, we could eliminate an entire industry founded upon smell.
Dr. Mary T. Hunsicker, a dermatologist, calls this business of "smelling clean" a 20th century phenomenon. This fixation with smell has gone beyond personal hygiene; your home, office, and car must also smell fresh. It is very difficult to purchase an "unscented" product on the market anymore. No other culture in the world spends as much energy or money just to smell good.
The relatively limited research involving the communicative aspects of scent and smell has been referred to as olfactics. Richmond, McCrosky, and Payne graphically expressed it when they wrote, "If pornography is in the eye of the beholder, then certainly scent is in the nose of the smeller." People react very differently to various odors, and it has been suggested that during an illness such reactions may become either exaggerated, diminished or eliminated. For example, an 80-year-old woman admitted to the hospital for chest pains told her visiting son to bring her perfume and cosmetics from home because she didn't want to look and "smell" like death.
Not unlike animals, who have specific scents they communicate to one another, every human has an "olfactory signature." People in the workplace can often identify the presence of certain individuals by their smellprints, i.e., the type of cologne or perfume they are wearing. Clothing, likewise, gives off a variety of odors by which people are frequently identified.
Basically, there are four terms under which olfactic abilities are classified: macrosmia (a good sense of smell), microsmia (a poor sense of smell, anosmia (a loss of the sense of smell), and parosmia (a perverted sense of smell).
Within the boundaries of normal, there are certain odors that find acceptance among discriminating noses. They include such things as: leather upholstery of a new automobile, various organic fertilizers, clothes just out of a dryer or removed from an outdoor clothesline, a newly struck match, lighter fluid, gasoline or freshly baked bread.
Scents are invisible communicators of states, emotions, feelings, and attraction; as powerful communicators, they serve to determine whether an interaction between people will be initiated, continued or terminated. Conscious or unconscious, our sense of smell appears to play a much greater role in our daily lives than most of us realize. Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, suggests, "The combined natural scents of a woman such as her hair, breasts, skin, armpits, and genital region may be a greater asset than her beauty." Dr. Robert Henkin, at Georgetown University's Taste and Smell Clinic, found that 25 percent of the people with smell and scent disorders lost their interest in sex.
An effort has been made to determine if males and females excrete something like animal pheromones that attract one another. In fact, there is belief among some researchers that alpha androstenol, a chemical found in male urine and sweat might facilitate such an attraction. Still others are looking at the possibility that females exude scents from the genitals that attract males. Once again the research in this area of communication is sparse and inconclusive. Only speculation and inference prevails.
Most living creatures have pheromones -- chemical secretions that attract other animals for mates (pherin, from the Greek meaning to carry, and Horman, to excite or stimulate). It has been estimated that the average person is able to recognize at least 4,000 distinct scents. Some can recognize as many as 10,000. Women and men, however, may perceive odors differently.
Theory has it that the difference in terms of memory may be traced to survival as a species and to a linkage with the brain. According to Trygg Engen, "We possess an odor memory which lasts longer than any other forms of memory, because of (1) the nearness of sensory input to the brain area receptive to the information, (2) a more direct, quicker, and less edited type of message comes from olfactory information, yielding (3) a memory which is stronger, due to associations between the odor and the situation."
Anthropologist, Edward Hall, has this to say about smell when one crosses cultural lines:
"Olfaction occupies a prominent place in Arab life. Not only is it one of the distance-setting mechanisms, but it is a vital part of a complex system of behavior. Arabs consistently breathe on people when they talk. However, this habit is more than a matter of different manners. To the Arab, good smells are pleasing and a way of being involved with each other. To smell one's friend is not only nice but desirable, for to deny him your breath is to act ashamed. Americans, on the other hand, trained as they are, not to breathe in people's faces, automatically communicate shame in trying to be polite."
A correlation exists between scent and smell. Smell can evoke meanings and memories of things, people, and places from the past; actually, one's olfactory sense facilitates a connection with the past. We adapt our sense of smell (smell adaptation) every time we enter a new environment. Upon entering a chocolate factory, we immediately inhale the pleasant aroma of chocolate. Or, while blindfolded, most of us would immediately know we were in a hospital because of its many characteristic odors.
Diagnostic and therapeutic texts on health care assign only token importance to how patients smell. Nurse personnel who spend considerably more time at the bedside than doctors, quickly learn to discriminate between unique odors associated with various patients and diseases. In a book titled, The Smell Book: Scents, Sex, and Society, its author, R. Winter, reports that the following diseases were successfully detected by doctors by the odors their patients emitted. Yellow fever smelled like the butcher shop odor. Scurvy and smallpox had putrid odors. Typhoid fever smelled like freshly baked bread. Diphtheria had a very sweet odor, and the plague had the odor of apples. While many of these diseases no longer exist, the important thing to be noted is that the power of scent could be an invaluable diagnostic tool.
Watch for Part II of this article in our June 18, 1933 issue.
Abne M. Eisenberg, DC, PhD
Croton on Hudson, New York
Editor's Note:
As a professor of communication, Dr. Eisenberg is frequently asked to speak at conventions and regional meetings. For further information regarding speaking engagements, you may call (914) 271-4441, or write to Two Wells Ave., Croton on Hudson, New York 10520.