Olfactory Girl 

Smell is often reduced to a secondary or lesser sense. Attempts that I can think of to spotlight smell, like scratch and sniff stickers, mr. sketch markers or smell-o-vision feel kitschy and nostalgic and unserious. And even during Covid when so many people temporarily lost their ability, a 2022 study still showed that the majority of respondents would give up their sense of smell for a measly $10,000.

Conversely, the ancient Greeks and Romans were dead serious (and seriously dead) about smell, linking it directly to health and divinity. Aristotle argued that smell is a bridge to taste, claiming that "pleasant" aromas evolved specifically to protect our health. Ancient Athenians engaged with their statues through scent, slathering them in oils and draping them in garlands of spices and flowers until certain deities became synonymous with a specific fragrance: Aphrodite with roses, Apollo with laurel, Dionysos with smoky thursdays.

But us future idiots in the modern world have abandoned scent and all its great powers. We do not afford it the seriousness it deserves. Instead, we’ve reduced it to yankee candles and synthetic vanilla extract.

Smell acts as a wayfinding device. It orients you to a place and time. If I had only my sense of smell and nothing else, I reckon I’d be able to find my way on foot from Koukaki back to Excarchia (stopping for a souvlaki or two on the way, of course).

Smell is also defensive. It turns out that you can only smell ants when they’re stressed out and/or have been crushed to death. So far all you sharp-nosed, ant smelling show-offs, what you’re actually smelling is violence. The same thing applies for fresh cut grass - it starts to smell because it emits “Green Leaf Volatiles”, a defensive distress signal. Even the delicious smell of garlic & onions is emitted in an attempt to repel pests and protect the plant from fungal infections.

Smell is purposeful. It’s not just a nostalgic bric-a-brac; it’s evidence of molecular truth.  

Olfacio, ergo sum

In the 18th century, there was a very lazy priest and philosopher named Étienne Bonnot De Condillac. In his book Treatise on the Sensations, Condillac argued that our consciousness and moral existence is built uniquely out of raw sensory perception. He demonstrates this in a fun, sexy thought experiment, asking us to close our eyes and imagine a marble statue, completely inanimate, awakened to the world one of the five senses at a time. He started with smell.

Condillac first grants the statue the scent of a rose. Because the statue has no eyes to see the stem, no sense of touch to feel a thorn, and no concept of an ‘outside’ world, it cannot think, “I am a person smelling a flower.” Instead, Condillac explains that the statue's entire universe collapses into that single olfactory molecule. The statue becomes the odour of the rose. When the scent is removed, a residue remains and thus, the statue gains memory.  The statue is then given other smells - carnation, jasmine, violets. By comparing these new scents to the memory of the rose, preference and desire begin to shape its interior life. (Not many people know this, but Seal actually has a PhD in this very concept)

Condillac then proceeds to give the statue the remaining senses, first sound, then sight, and finally touch. Through this progressive addition of senses, the statue gains the ability to compare and to judge, and then can distinguish between pleasure and pain. Once imbued with all the senses, he erupts into full human consciousness. For Condillac, thinking, reasoning, and even our moral judgments are not mysterious, abstract virtues built into our souls from birth; they are simply our raw physical sensations, transformed and sophisticated over time by our interface with the world.

Just like Condillac's statue when he encounters the scent of a rose, in August, in Athens, I AM the hot garbage.  

Deodorize me, Daddy

A lot of visitors to Athens describe it as dirty and smelly. This is true. It’s both. But it is also alive. North American cities, in particular, are typically much more visually pristine, but in terms of sensations, they tend to be much more sterile.

In her book Urban Smellscapes, the researcher Victoria Henshaw wrote that modern engineering is obsessed with hiding the "plumbing" of human survival.

Most modern cities implement aggressive, invisible methods to render their environments completely scent-neutral. For example, in commercial districts, urban planners deliberately choose hybrid ornamental tree breeds that have been genetically engineered not to flower, specifically to eliminate those heavy, honeyed scents of honeysuckle or linden that might disrupt a consumer zone. Or they exclusively plant male clones of the Ginkgo biloba tree, because the female trees drop seeds that rot on the pavement and smell like rancid butter.

The physical infrastructure of our cities is also weaponized against naturally occurring smells. Unlike brick or untreated clay, which absorbs the environment and emits a heavy, earthy odour when it gets damp, modern plazas and pedestrian districts are built using treated stone and synthetic composites engineered to repel moisture and stay completely inert. And where older versions of cities let you smell the underground through raw subway grates, modern urban design uses hidden exhaust stacks and charcoal filters to scrub the smell of sewage before it can ever hit the street.

Or think of ‘ambient scent marketing’, as Henshaw calls it. If you’ve ever been within a 300-meter distance of an Abercrombie & Fitch, you are familiar with this concept. Instead of allowing organic smells, businesses will pump synthetic scents into the air meant to be pleasing and to trigger ‘buying’ behaviour.

When we scrub a surface clean of its history, its labor, and its decay, we aren't making it safer - we are making it unreadable. A completely sanitized environment lies to us; it pretends that consumption has no cost.

Surfaces, like the cities we live in, should be readable and honest. There are no good or bad smells, just honest or dishonest ones.

And it is my belief that we are forcing our bodies to repeat the same sanitizing logic as the smells on our streets.

RIP Cassavetes, you would have hated Botox

I’m 38 years old, an age where the human surface, our faces especially, start to get really interesting. Yet, I am surrounded by Botox. It has become our default state. Almost everyone has it, or is planning on getting it soon. If you don’t think that’s true for you, look harder. We live in an era of paralyzed foreheads and migrated fillers.

I tell myself that I believe fiercely in bodily autonomy, but I’m deeply disturbed by the prevalence of Botox and I’m trying to understand why. At first blush, it seems deeply hypocritical. I have tattoos. Why is this different? The only coherent distinction I can make is the difference between decoration and preservation. A tattoo, no matter how stupid, is an addition; it’s an active, visible inscription onto a surface. A tattoo is permanent, and at the constant mercy of your body as you age. It gets sunburnt, it stretches, it fades, it sags. It decays along with you, so it feels readable. Botox, conversely, is a subtraction. It doesn't decorate the surface; it attempts to halt time. Just like a scent-neutral city, faces with no expression lie to us. It pretends that bodies do not age or die.   

When we see someone else look sad or scared or happy, our brains tell our facial muscles to unconsciously mimic that expression. We frown or wince or smile. This physical mimicry sends an immediate signal back to the brains, the amygdala, to help us interpret and feel the emotion of the person standing in front of us. When you freeze your face, you don't just stop a wrinkle; you disrupt the mechanical feedback loop that allows for human empathy. You choose to become unreadable. A pre-conscious marble statue, if you will.

Public life depends on readable surfaces. We build communities based on shared perception. Both the sanitized city and the Botoxed face operate out of the exact same terror: they fear the leakage. They fear the involuntary disclosure of reality.

Lacan said that of all the senses, smell is the only that reduces the distance to zero. And even though he was a little French weirdo, he’s right. A world where we try to manufacture a distance is a dishonest one. A deodorized, Botoxed world is a world that refuses intimacy.   

In Which Sniffing is Outlawed in the Near-Future Dystopia

Someday, we’ll all live in that completely deodorized city. We will wander through sterile plazas of sealed stone, under cloned trees that don’t know how to blossom, and we will weep at our misfortune. But the salinity from our tears produces an unauthorized smell and Mayor Descartes kicks us out. Once we’re exiled and past the city gates, we start furiously stepping on ants just to smell something.

I can’t stop any of this. I can only frantically frown my disproval, in hopes that the lines in my forehead drive down so deep in my face that they form a moat.