Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.
Katy Kelleher connects how scent shouldn’t be discounted as one of our senses. Scent makes a place, both physical as to where we are in the world at a particular time and the emotion and memories it evokes. With the background as a perfumer, they illustrate the importance unique smells brought to different cultures. Historically, language has had difficulty accurately translating or describing smell despite the power it can evoke.
Helen Keller called our sense of smell the “fallen angel.”
“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.”