Smell is our primitive sense. Our primordial sensation. Our ability to identify and interpret the molecules hovering around us is common to all animals, even bacteria. We start smelling the moment we are born, we recognize our Mother’s scent and she recognizes ours in the early hours of our existence.

We continue to smell one another throughout our lives. Children can often recognize one another’s odor. As adults, we can usually identify the odor of our mate. We each possess our own individual, signature odor. Trained dogs can tell my odor from your odor, can even distinguish the odors of two brothers and sometimes even twins. Someday locks, mobile phones and computers may identify us by our individual smells.

Molecules of smell are identified in a small patch in the nose which shoots messages of their arrival directly into a primitive part of the brain, the limbic system, so closely related to areas of emotions and memories, that a smell can evoke a long forgotten memory of people and places that no longer exist.  It’s almost as if the memories are retractable only by the index of the smell, which has to reappear before they are conjured back up. The smell memory persists for decades.

When we love a smell, we seek out its bearer, when we hate a smell we withdraw.  When the foul odor is the breath or body odor of a close person, we recoil or even escape. No wonder then that in German when you want to say that you cannot stand someone you say “Ich kann nicht riechen”. No wonder that 72% of British females would not date a guy with mundgeruch – bad breath. No wonder that they ranked bad body odor as the worst possible turnoff. I myself remember once dating a girl with body odor. Once.

I spent most of my professional career fixing bad human smells, mostly bad breath, but also body odor and even foot and shoe odors. My lab invented one of the best selling mouthwashes in the UK, solving the breath problems of millions of Brits, allowing them to mate and procreate. There are tens of thousands of British youngsters who owe me their very existence.

After spending so many years smelling the foul odors of many thousands of people, I have become intensely jealous of people in the perfume industry who spend their careers on the side of the good odors. But curiosity has also led me to wonder, as a scientist, what it’s all about, and where it is taking us.

So let me jump right now to what worries me. On the one hand, we know a lot about the kind of odors that attract us. When I say we, I mean those perfume companies, and there aren’t very many of them, who know the secrets behind concocting seductive perfumes.

Ah, but when the odour of someone we’re with is fetching, it attracts us, it seduces us, it compels us, we follow it like a dog following the scent trail of the chase, the hunt.

One of the favorite singers of my youth, Gordon Lightfoot, begins his song, Affair on 8th Avenue, not with how the woman looked, but rather how she smelled. Close your eyes and try to smell the song as I sing it.

Friends, now is the time to come clean. What are we looking for?

Our talk today focuses on the fragrances we wear on our bodies. I’ve called it “The Secret Behind the Perfumes”. Many of the secrets are still unknown to us and may never be discovered. I’ll discuss just a few of the ones that I think have a bearing to how we live and on our future.

The first secrets have to do with our love for the smell of flowers. Is there anyone here who doesn’t love the smell of a rose, jasmine or other flowers? We have been crushing, mashing and extracting the essential oils of flowers for many thousands of years and applying the wonderful scents on our bodies. The natural extract of a Bulgarian rose costs over 5000 dollars a kilo, but is still used in fine fragrances, just a bit, mind you.

But have you ever wondered why flowers smell so wonderful? Flowers, after all, are sex organs of plants. The odors they emit are supposed to attract pollinating insects, not us. As far as I know humans pollinate flowers (at least as far as I know). Yet for some reason, just like insects, we have this kinky sexual attraction to flowers.

By the way, this attraction to the smell of flowers is something that develops with our sexual maturity, pre-puberty kids don’t seem to care that much about the odor of flowers and if there was a perfume for kids it would probably smell of chocolate and peanut butter. Kids don’t rub flower extracts all over their body. We do.

At least we think we do. That is because the scrumptious floral scents and other aromas in our fine fragrances, our hair products, our detergents, our body sprays, are synthetic, they are made from petroleum, just as plastics are. The chemical reactions that allows you to create odor in the laboratory is something that scientists have been doing since the 1880s.

One of the pioneering scientists in this field, Haarmann, figured out how to synthesize vanillin, the basic aroma of vanilla, and set up a factory here in Germany, in Holzminden.

The company is now called Symrise, where they synthesize hundreds of odor molecules, and sell about two billion dollars worth of aroma each year. Symrise is one of a dozen humble, relatively anonymous companies who are the real manufacturers of the fine fragrances that we buy in the stores, their perfumers create the essences we use today. The brands we recognize order the essence, brand it, add alcohol and water, put it in a fancy bottle and market it.

Are you still curious? Well, curious is actually created by Symrise. Britney Spears may have many other talents, but she isn’t a perfumer.

Today’s fine fragrances may contain a bit of natural extracts, but are mostly synthetic. After all, growing, harvesting, and extracting most flowers is expensive, and on the way you can lose some of the important fragrance notes. Synthetic reactions are controllable, the products are predictable and the fragrances remarkably similar year after year. And so, even though the perfume you wear might cost a hundred dollars or more, the ingredients may cost less than half a dollar per bottle. The rest goes into the bottle, the packaging, the profit.

The story gets more intriguing when we look into several other components of perfumes. For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, we have sought out the odor glands of animals such as the one I am about to mention. Can you guess? These small deer live in Asia and were hunted almost to extinction. They could fetch $45,000 each. Not for the meat I assure you, but rather for a little sac of odor near their anus. Will it help if I tell you that I read somewhere that their name means ‘testicle’ in Sanskrit. The poor musk deer. They were saved in the 1880s by the same intrepid scientists who began to manufacture some of these funky odors synthetically, the so-called ‘white musks’.

These molecules don’t reproduce the entire spectrum of the natural musk, but are close enough. They are so powerful and evocative for us humans, that they are incorporated not only in many perfumes, but also commonly used in fabric softeners to give them a je ne sais pas quoi, a fresh note. These compounds are used sparingly, often at levels that we cannot recognize cognitively.

Perfumers call these types of molecules ‘fixatives’ because they evaporate slowly and help fix the other odors into the perfume so that they are released over time.  But they are not only fixatives. They are sexual attractants, meant for deer, but also close enough to our biology to send us into sexual overdrive.  So close enough to our biology that there are studies suggesting that these chemicals cause worrisome changes in our hormonal system. Consider it the next time someone tells you “I love you, deer”.

I call the base notes, the ‘bottom’ notes because they are reminiscent of odors coming from the lower part of the body.  Care to differ? Should I mention that many perfumes contain just a whiff of indole and skatole, two of the main components of feces.  Funny enough, they smell kind of nice at the right dilution. Makes you kind of wonder, doesn’t it.

Perfumes are marketed aggressively, advertisements with a fetching woman or man, always with sexual connotations. A lot of the magic is hype and illusion. After all, what you smell in the shop is not the perfume itself. It’s only the so-called ‘top notes’, those volatile messengers of flirt, frivolity and fantasy. They disappear within minutes.

This flitting glimpse, these top notes are actually formulated to help persuade you to buy the product. The top notes, made up primarily of very volatile molecules, are followed by the medium, or heart notes that then kick in, followed eventually by the darker, foresty so called base notes which contain the sexual odors of deer, sometimes beaver and so on.

There are about one thousand perfumes available retail at any one time. So go into fashion, some go out of fashion. Some succeed in the marketplace, most fail. If you want to find a really good perfume, then the shop with the advertising, the crafty saleswoman and the glimpse of the odor is not the right venue.  You have to take the perfume home for a week or two, try it out over the course of the day, and get feedback from your partner and from the workplace.

How many of you have bought perfume you thought would work for you and then left it on your dresser for a couple of years? If you have, throw it out. Perfumes go bad after a couple of years. They contain reactive molecules and are sensitive to light, heat and oxygen, and thus should be kept in the cold, and tightly closed. If you want to keep a perfume for many years, stick it in the refrigerator. In the industry, perfumes are kept in sealed aluminium containers.

So here is my suggestion for your consideration. What the world needs now, is an FRL, a fragrance reference library. A library which stocks on its shelves not books, but hundreds of different fine fragrances. Library members can take home several perfumes for a week or two, return them and try a few others until they find the ones that work for them. Any interested entrepreneurs in the audience, please talk to me soonest.

One of the common marketing ploys is indeed spreading the notion that a commercial perfume has a unique smell on you because of your skin, your complexion and so on. Indeed hundreds of years ago, the stinking rich could go to a perfumer and have them craft a unique fragrance which would be theirs for life.

And if you have a couple of thousand dollars to spare, I can recommend a couple of bespoke shops in London that claim to do the same. But your skin, pH and complexion don’t do that much to change the basic smell of a perfume, and if you’re wearing Curious, any curious perfumer can pick it off at twenty paces.  What does influence the smell of the perfume you’re wearing are all the other fragrances you’ve got on – your hair conditioner and shampoo, body soap, fabric softener, lip gloss, deodorant, hand cream, just to name a few.

What I really fret about is what this is doing to our biology and our future.  Scientists, myself included, believe that the adult body gives off various volatile chemical signals, mostly from the armpit, related to attraction and genetic compatibility. We each have a unique natural odor, easily identified by trained dogs.

While other mammals are content to smell each other’s natural odor combo at will, looking for genetic and other mating clues, we are obsessed with obliterating our real odor, and substituting hypnotic smells from other species that are highly attractive, yet don’t reflect our true biology. Our own natural scents have a lot to say about who we are, from a health and genetic standpoint. Women often admit that the body odor of particular men is attractive, sometimes even overwhelming.  In the past, damsels would incubate a handkerchief in their armpit, then wave it or drop it when a prospective beau passes by.

Napolean wrote to Josephine, “Ne te lave pas, j’arrive”. I also admit to being attracted to the natural smell of women, my wife in particular.

Civilization forces us to live in crowded environments, where we try to hide our intimate nature by wearing clothes, and yes, by hiding and modifying our own intimate smells. With the advent of antiperspirants, also invented during the 1880s, we can hide our natural funky body odor, and smell like Britney Spears or Tom Cruise. Have a look. Imagine if a $100 operation could turn anyone into an alpha-male or female. With fragrances it can. From a biological perspective, it’s worrisome.

So, in conclusion, modern cosmetic products allow us to hide our natural odors and use attractive molecules to draw others towards us. But it’s a double edged sword. Perfumes are best applied sparingly, in moderation. At some stage you do want the natural odor of your partner, and yours to shine through. In order to make sure the match is heaven sent, and not heaven scent.